Urban Planning and Corona Spaces – Scales, Walls and COVID-19 Coincidences

Baganz, Gösta and Baganz, Daniela and Kloas, Werner and Lohrberg, Frank (2020) Urban Planning and Corona Spaces – Scales, Walls and COVID-19 Coincidences. SHAPING URBAN CHANGE – Livable City Regions for the 21st Century. Proceedings of REAL CORP 2020, 25th International Conference on Urban Development, Regional Planning and Information Society. pp. 1251-2161. ISSN 2521-3938

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Abstract

This study focuses on the role and responsibility of urban planning in mitigating the COVID-19 pandemic ́s impact. The far-reaching social and economic consequences of this threat are counteracted by organisational and constructional measures to prevent lockdowns and finally illnesses and deaths. Corona spaces and voids are introduced as a consistent multi scale approach concerning the pandemics spatial implications and respective measures. These terms are operationalised for urban planning and can be used as an overarching concept to be communicated within cross-sectoral planning tasks. A comparison of Taiwan's and the USA's responses to the outbreak suggests that the coincidence at the beginning of a pandemic can be controlled by institutional precautions. On an urban scale, organisational measures (e.g. contact tracing, quarantine, and lockdown) can be supported by constructional ones concerning e.g. transport, public spaces, urban agriculture, and offices aimed at crowding reduction. If appropriate measures are applied, urban density does not seem to increase spreading the virus, whereby a regression analysis based on data of districts in Germany shows no relationship between population density and COVID-19 deaths. Lockdown prevention should be a planning goal and multifunctional approaches that integrate aspects of virus resilience should be favoured over the monothematic urban development approach (Leitbild) of a virus resilient city. Urban planning can contribute to the mitigation of future outbreaks by including pandemic preparedness in planning frameworks.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	COVID-19, urban planning, Corona spaces, pandemic preparedness, lockdown prevention
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor H Social Sciences > HM Sociology R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine > RA0421 Public health. Hygiene. Preventive Medicine
Depositing User:	REAL CORP Administrator
Date Deposited:	02 Feb 2021 17:50
Last Modified:	02 Feb 2021 17:50
URI:	http://repository.corp.at/id/eprint/667

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