The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on urban design: exploring the effects on morphological, social, and perceptual dimensions: a systematic review

Source abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic that struck China, led to unprecedented restrictions on citizens’ freedom and daily life. One of these restrictions was limiting people’s presence in public spaces, which significantly influenced people’s lives. Researchers have been striving since the start of the pandemic to examine various aspects of the pandemic and its impacts on cities and citizens’ lives, providing the necessary knowledge and information to enhance urban resilience and offering methods for urban design in response to the pandemic. Because of rapid urbanization and climate change the possibility of other epidemics happening in the next few decades are not far from expectance so the relationship between public spaces and health challenges should be examined. Our main goal in conducting this research is to systematically and categorically examine how the COVID-19 pandemic affects three important aspects of urban design. Categorizing the subject helps designers and urban planners make informed, evidence-based decisions. This paper studies the effect of COVID-19 epidemic on morphological, social, and perceptual dimensions of urban design. The reason of choosing these dimensions was to assess the effects of the epidemic from both physical, and non-physical perspective. The PRISMA checklist is used, to guarantee quality reporting for the systematic review.