Introducing the Implications of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Urban Design, Architecture, and Residents’ Behaviour

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic marked a threshold in everyone’s life, consequently generating new spatial-social (forced) innovations in the spheres of both architectural and urban thinking. The relationship between humans—and space—and humans became a major subject of interrogation on a kind of new normality. The pandemic context required distant communication, remote working/learning, and physical/social isolation. Considering the possibility that similar kinds of events might repeat, the process revealed naturally certain lessons from which we must learn. First, it revealed the role of public spaces as an essential place of spatial quality, which became quintessential in such a circumstance. Their design and reconceptualization, especially in spatial-functional terms, ask to be reconsidered. Especially in mass and multifamily housing developments, their presence quantitatively and qualitatively needs to be reconsidered starting from the real human scale. Interestingly the remote working and teaching processes were also tested during the pandemic, from what we learned there are a lot of pros as well as criticalities in the distance working/learning process, not only in professional aspects but also in relationships and people interaction aspects. Although it pushed toward more virtual reality, the pandemic worked as a “live” experience to understand the potential and the extent of digital technologies in making such a reality possible. Last but not least, the lesson was related to the personalization of space through isolation, to avoid the spread with preventive reasons. In this respect, several experiments have been proposed; however, the nature of this operation on its own is featured by ontological limitations. Finally, it can be said that these lessons should rapidly be reflected in architectural and design pedagogical processes aiming to train the next generation of architects/urban planners toward a new normality, foreseeing that the reflections should be implemented in the curricula and courses of architecture/engineering programs, to forerun future similar situations with adequate approaches.