Densification, Social Distance and the City

And The City, Essay, High Density, Prima Abdullah, Territory and mobility, Urban Paradigms

Affordable Housing, City, COVID-19, Density, Digital technologies, Distribution, Efficiency, Essay, Healthy city, History, Homeless, Housing, london, New urban lifestyles, New York, Population, Singapore, Social dynamics, Sustainability, Urban design, Urban planning

Listen to the related podcast: Densification, Social Distance and the City by And the City -- https://urbannext.net/densification-social-distance-the-city/

At the time this article was written, most of the world was under a global quarantine, either self-imposed or mandated. It is hard to see how the future will be the same as before. Having the benefit of hindsight from past pandemics, we can characterize two outcomes to this current event. First, the social implication will be a permanent condition: the new normal, where we will have to rethink the shape of our society and its most slowly affected derivation, urban design. The second possible outcome might be no change, either because the pandemic is not significant enough, or the changes are already ongoing. In the second outcome, quarantine is merely a hindrance. We will look into two cases: the 1846 Broad Street cholera outbreak and the 1918 Spanish flu.