Urban spaces as a positive catalyst during pandemics: Assessing the community's well-being by using artificial intelligence techniques

Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, lifestyles changed completely. This new normality damages human psy-chology and mental health. Hence, new approaches must be considered while shaping public spaces to accommodate the pandemic life. This paper aims to show the importance of exploiting outdoor spaces to save people's mental health. Accordingly, an online survey is conducted and analyzed by Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) for more precise answers. Afterward, the most important public spaces during the pandemic are extracted; consequently, another questionnaire has been held to validate these items. The last one has been run through a machine learning technique to classify and categorize the users' different preferences in three situations only. It was found that 85,17% of the sample declared the importance of outdoor public spaces. However, future research is needed to rethink urban spaces' design and to relocate the activities done within indoor public spaces to the outdoors to maintain human mental health.(c) 2022 THE AUTHORS. Published by Elsevier BV on behalf of Faculty of Engineering, Ain Shams Uni-versity. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Automated summary

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the importance of outdoor public spaces for maintaining people's mental health is highlighted. An online survey, statistical analysis, and machine learning techniques were used to identify the significance of outdoor spaces and categorize user preferences. The results showed that 85.17% of the sample acknowledged the importance of outdoor public spaces. However, further research is needed to reconsider urban design and relocate indoor activities outdoors to preserve human mental well-being.