COVID-19 reshaping cities: From past pandemics toward future healthier urban planning

Health diseases throughout history have brought cities’ design and infrastructures the challenge to improve and control the spread of the infectious virus. In the 19th century, the concern regarding promoting hygiene and healthy environments led to developing several urban design models and innovations. Urban planners such as Cerdà, Ebenezer Howard, Clarence Perry, and Le Corbusier were fundamental to the evolution of new urban approaches. In the 20th century, the World Health Organization started the movement known as Health Cities, which had as the main goal of promoting a healthy approach to environmental design. The debate on how to build a better urban environment is constantly under discussion, as the world’s circumstance keeps changing and has now been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Since it was declared a pandemic in March 2020, city governments, together with architects, urban planners, and health professionals, discussed how this pandemic will reshape future urban design. This thesis analyzes how pandemics have affected urban design in the past and how the current COVID-19 emergency affected cities and their inhabitants through the measures adopted to control the spread of the virus. Nations worldwide developed strategies to recover and build better-adapted cities in the future, which were analyzed and applied in the Study Case in the city of Gothenburg, Sweden.