Elsevier

Cities

Volume 118, November 2021, 103324
Cities

Role of urban planning characteristics in forming pandemic resilient cities – Case study of Covid-19 impacts on European cities within England, Germany and Italy

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2021.103324Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Study factors share a combined contribution to the COVID-19 infection rates with a 60.2% model effectiveness.

  • Intracity connectivity is the most influential factor in the spread of COVID 19 and is statistically significant at α= 0.01.

  • This study supports the findings of previous studies in claiming the ineffectiveness of density on the spread of COVID-19.

  • Intercity connectivity, city size, and city Form revealed an insignificant impact on the transmission of COVID-19.

  • Improving public transportation efficiency before people start considering long-term switches to private vehicles.

Abstract

In recent decades, the world has witnessed a variety of emerging infectious diseases, some of which developed to pandemic world threatening outbreaks, the ongoing COVID-19 is known to be taking the lead in claiming lives around the globe and thus, urging people to trail its increasing figures. Therefore, this research aims to emphasize the role of urban planning in containing such outbreaks through running a series of analytical and statistical studies on European cities, worst inflicted region, to analyze the main urban features they share and that may be propagating the disease spread according to their population size, density, form, intracity connectivity and intercity connectivity. This study, as far as we know of, is the first practice to evaluate both the individual and combined impacts of these factors on recorded rates of infections. According to the context of this research, it is concluded that the diversity found in urban features are, to a large degree, related to cities being more vulnerable than others. Intracity connectivity through public transport is found to be the possible prime factor of this study, and is followed by population size, density, and intercity connectivity. Urban morphology seems to also contribute to such outbreak, with both radial and grid cities being associated to higher infections rates as to linear cities. Henceforth, setting priorities in post-pandemic urban planning schemes is essential for planning resilient cities that are capable to thrive and maintain functionality with lowest possible infections amid else possible diseases that are to follow in severity.

Keywords

COVID-19
Resilience
City size
City density
City form
City connectivity

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