POST-COVID CITY: Assessing the Role of Urban Design in Achieving Social Distance and Coping Urban Behaviour in Four Types of Neighbourhoods in Greater Cairo Region.

Abstract

The uprising spread of corona virous pandemic gives social distance a great concern as a new way of life in contemporary cities. Covid-19 has forced planners and scholars to question health safety of traditional neighborhoods that are perceived as main reason for the spread of covid 19. Accordingly, they suggest that the turn to modern neighborhood will contain the spread of covid-19 infection. This research aims to examine the relation between urban form and transmission of respiratory virus to highlight major lessons that can be learned for post-covid city. The research assumes that minimizing social distance to the spatial dimensions that limit to design large spaces community is a misleading. Rather, safe social distance is embedded in people coping urban behavior that can be facilitated in resilient urban forms. The research assumes that different types of urban forms create different levels of urban resilience that can facilitate different levels of coping urban behavior and mitigation of occupation density that accordingly impact the level of infection spread. To examine such assumption, the research depends on deductive method using a comparative analysis of four different types of neighborhoods. It reports, based on empirical findings, three main conclusions. Firstly, it reports that covid19 caused different levels of coping behavioral change and occupation density across different types of neighborhoods. Secondly, it observed coping ideas, such as reducing unnecessary activities, reducing activities frequency and duration, distributing activities to different times of the day, distributing activities to different locations of the community, and displacement of activities from the indoor to the outdoor. Finally, it deduced different design guides such as soft density, soft mixed use, and grid street patterns that are important for achieving urban resilience and can facilitate required coping behavior to mitigate occupation density in urban spaces and accordingly control viral infection.