Post-pandemic urban design: The equilibrium between social distancing and social interactions within the built environment

The previous arguments in respect to the COVID-19 pandemic tend to support the lockdown and closure policy in order to prevent widespread infection of the epidemic within urban spaces. Using semi-structured interviews, the present study identifies that there are some serious consequences by adopting this policy due to the indispensable social interactions and uncooperative attitude of the general public to the harsh isolation approaches. These negative impacts on people's psychological health are partly caused by the inflexible urban design of the built environment in the pre-pandemic period. To create a balance between social distancing and social interactions within urban spaces, the paper proposes a general framework of post-pandemic street furniture design. It provides an innovative approach using a grid-based method, which can be applied to other cities across the world in order to deal with the potential analogous pandemic perils in the future.

Automated summary

The study suggests that while lockdown and closure policies are effective in preventing the spread of epidemics, they can also have serious consequences, including negative impacts on people's mental health. To address this issue, there is a need to find a balance between social distancing and social interactions within urban spaces.