Revival of Mankind: Post- COVID-19
P. ARAVIND KUMAR , SANYOG JADHAO, SUMIT SOURAV ORAON
1180100770 1180100783 1180100788
Abstract
As COVID-19 has shown, an outbreak can occur at any time. Architecture can be an agent to help reduce the risk. By creating spaces that prioritize health-giving attributes—through the circulation of airflow, spatial design, biophilic elements, natural light, and selection of the right building materials—architecture can be built for healing, and to support infection control. The pandemic has revealed that making healthy cities a parameter for development is also essential. Strengthening urban healthcare infrastructure to handle the rush of patients with new infections, and disruptions in general healthcare services, particularly public health services like immunization, will prevent urban populations from being exposed to additional infections and disease outbreaks. Strengthening health infrastructure must also go hand in hand with using digital tools to amplify healthcare delivery. The COVID-19 crisis has seen a surge in the use of telemedicine services, which citizens were heretofore slow to embrace.
The COVID-19 crisis will result in substantial adjustments in how we shape, administer, and live in cities. Our understanding of cities, as dense conglomerations of constant social interactions, might be overhauled. We must come to terms with this and ensure that systems undergo the changes that accompany this understanding, be it in mobility, housing, employment, or financial investments. While it may seem impossible to do in the immediate future, stakeholders must make concerted efforts in making the changes that will assist crisis prevention in the future, and also mitigate the adverse short-term consequences of the pandemic.
1. Introduction
The current global pandemic has quickly transformed our spaces, affecting how people live, work, and move through their day-to-day lives. It’s hard not to pay more attention to our physical realm these days given the fact so many of us are sheltering in place, or are likely to be doing so soon. For many in the design community, however, the rapid spread of COVID-19 has caused them to reevaluate their life’s work, and what it might mean to design for a world that will never be quite the same, especially when it comes to how we gather in and use large public spaces, like airports, hotels, hospitals, gyms, and offices. Coronavirus isn’t the world's first pandemic. A pandemic is the worst scenario that happens when an epidemic outbreaks beyond the country’s borders. When epidemics, especially respiratory ones emerge, precautionary measures emphasize the necessity of isolation, and closure of public spaces. Also, it turns the image of cities and public spaces into empty environments, but mostly after the end of the crisis; it requires a change in the city’s shape to integrate community health practices and social thinking into urban design.
2. Pandemic in the History
Thinking carefully about the historical events in the 19thcentury; the second industrial revolution, or as it was known as the technological revolution which peaked between 1870-1914, was an important phase of unprecedented urbanization. During these days; cities became densely populated, full of tall residential buildings, railways, transportation, and public spaces for entertainment and welfare. After that, between 1918-1919; the deadliest
respiratory virus pandemic in history “Spanish Flu pandemic” killed more than 50 million people worldwide, which had a clear impact on slowing down in urban growth and limiting
public life for a period in order to slow the spread of disease. For example, public transportation had been replaced by walking in uncrowded streets, most of the population were staying at home, and sidewalks at night were unusually clear, which is similarly related to the current pandemic situation
Alvar Aalto’s Paimio Sanatorium
Some of the most significant architectural experiments throughout history have come from a focus on physical space and its role in treating, curing, and preventing sickness long before vaccines were available. Hygiene was a principle that ran through the entire design process of architect Alvar Aalto’s tuberculosis sanatorium in Finland, built-in 1929. Finland had suffered the greatest loss of life to tuberculosis across the European countries and the design by Alvar and Aino Aalto is widely regarded as the first example of modern architecture applied to healthcare.
With no pharmacological treatment for tuberculosis, the Aaltos turned to the curative effects of access to light, air, and sunlight to shape their architectural response. Along with the building, the Aaltos also designed the sanatorium’s furniture and tableware, conceiving a sort of total artwork aimed at improving people’s health and well-being in a peaceful environment.
The 1931 Paimio Sanatorium Chair Alvar designed is still produced today. The angle of the chair’s back, built from bent birch plywood and therefore easy to clean, was designed to put the seated patient in a position that optimizes their breathing. They also designed the door handles in a more infection-resistant material, and curved them to prevent the door handles from catching the coats of visiting doctors.
3. Building Blocks of a Post-COVID-19 Green City
Cities are home to over 55 percent of the world’s population. Buzzing with life and activity, they drive the levers of an economy’s growth and development. The COVID-19 pandemic has inflicted a massive blow on all global economies, and cities have been at the forefront of the crisis. A failure to mitigate the grim realities of the pandemic has highlighted the deep vulnerabilities and inter-linkages between health, social, economic, and environmental systems in cities. The crisis has dramatically upended the contours of some of the most iconic cities around the world. At the same time, it has afforded individuals living in some of the most polluted cities a rare glimpse of unpolluted skies and clean air. The pandemic has offered the perfect opportunity to rethink the traditional building blocks of cities.
3.1 Rethink Urban Mobility
Urban transport is one of the sectors that have been most radically impacted by the pandemic and lockdown measures. Some of the busiest and most crowded streets, once crammed with an endless fleet of vehicles and people, were replaced by deserted and empty stretches during the lockdown. Unsurprisingly, this has had a dramatic impact on air pollution levels, carbon emissions, and the overall environmental footprint of cities. While the pandemic-induced climate dividends are likely to be temporary, they do offer an unprecedented opportunity to lock in the benefits of reduced congestion and air pollution by shifting to a sustainable and efficient urban mobility paradigm.
3.2 Embrace the Circular Economy Framework
An urban circular economy is one in which cities keep resources in use for as long as possible, extract the maximum value from them while in use, then recover and regenerate products and materials at the end of their life. As opposed to the traditional linear economy model in which we make, use and dispose of resources, the circular model focuses on building and preserving economic, natural, and social capital.
Cities like Amsterdam have emerged as global trailblazers on this front. The city’s municipality is the first in the world to adopt economist Kate Raworth’s Doughnut model and Circular Strategy 2020-25 as the policy basis for its COVID-19 revival plans. The new model and strategy focus on preserving value by reducing use and processing waste more intelligently across three major value chains—food and organic waste streams, consumer goods and the built environment—to achieve a fully circular city by 2050.
The circular economy framework promotes resilience in the face of unforeseen disruptions, such as pandemics and natural catastrophes. As city administrations mobilize resources to battle the health emergency and catalyze economic recovery, embracing circularity will go a long way in achieving economic, social, and environmental sustainability.
3.3 Invest in Green and Energy-Efficient Infrastructure
As cities prepare for an economic recovery, the steps they take must accelerate the transition to a more sustainable and competitive model. A core element of the transition is investing in green infrastructure at the city level. This primarily includes energy-efficient housing retrofits; renovations such as improved insulation, heating, and domestic energy storage systems; energy-efficient lighting; and rooftop solar installations, and electric vehicle charging infrastructure.
Investment in green infrastructure will not just build physical capital for cleaner and greener cities but also create many local jobs. Such investments would, therefore, provide a powerful pro-climate and economic stimulus. Sustainable infrastructure is not just confined to energy-efficient and resilient construction; it also includes investment in the natural infrastructure, green cover, and green spaces within cities. Soil and landscape restoration projects, investment in parks and community gardens, and tree plantation drives could create jobs over the short term while also generating net benefits from carbon sequestration, watershed protection, better crop yields, and forest products. Additionally, as detailed by the World Health Organization, green urban spaces will improve the physical, social, and mental well-being of citizens as they venture out of their homes freely.
The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that the traditional building blocks of cities are dangerously fragile and precariously unstable. It has also given us a sharp warning and a staggeringly bleak preview of the catastrophes that unmitigated climate change will unleash upon cities. As governments, institutions, and private citizens join forces to mitigate the havoc wreaked by the pandemic, it is important to reimagine the traditional foundations on which cities stand. A coordinated and coherent strategy that responds to COVID-19 and the climate emergency must be implemented to salvage economies from the pandemic-induced recession. Such an approach must put the economy on a resilient and sustainable growth trajectory. It must embody the circular economy framework and a sustainable urban mobility paradigm while aiming to accelerate investment in green infrastructure and renewables. How the fundamental blocks of cities are reimagined and rebuilt will shape the future of cities and communities all over the world.
4. Reimagining the Workspaces of the Future
Will the conveniences of work from home prove simply too attractive and lead companies to deem offices as anachronistic, wasteful extravagances to be done away with? Or will the office persist, battered, or in a different avatar? As the world emerges from the coronavirus-induced lockdowns, the workplace as we know it today may well cease to exist. How shall we make workplaces safer for those who have to go into work, and working remotely more effective for those who do not?
As the pandemic struck, a vast number of offices across the world witnessed a mass exodus as companies rapidly moved their entire staff to work from home. For many of these industries, murmurs proclaiming the death of the office were not exactly new: these trends have been underway for a while, as city rents skyrocketed and the digital revolution’s “weightless economies”, made work from home an occasional possibility. Real estate developers have their hearts in their mouths as they watch companies question their spatial requirements, we may indeed see some disruption in the secondary real-estate market as some companies ditch their properties, but it is unlikely that this will be as widespread a trend as feared. , as a reversal of densification within workspaces may create a need for more offices and even bigger spaces than before. Even tech companies, which have been the first and most enthusiastic adopters of work from home policies, are not looking to get rid of their office campuses completely (7). Decisions on this front are likely to be nuanced and carefully considered: the office still holds tremendous value for companies as space for employees to congregate and collaborate, and work towards a shared purpose.
4.1 Changing with the Times: Workplace Design
We can also expect a rise in distributed working, with companies looking to create multiple hubs to distribute the risk of an office being potentially struck down by the virus. A few are already looking for co-working space providers to step in and provide decentralized office spaces across cities.
Co-working could get a boost from those looking to outsource the trouble of providing high-maintenance workspaces and those needing low-cost, flexible office spaces for their employees. However, this will depend on how well the industry adapts to the need of the hour. Providers shall need to pivot from a focus on cozy huddle zones to sanitized, open spaces allowing social distancing, as security becomes the paramount consideration for employers. This may affect co-working business models considerably and make it economically non-viable for the smaller providers to survive. Those that can are likely to capture the market.
The workplaces we return to post-COVID-19 are likely to look very different from those we left behind. With safety trumping all other considerations, building design and office layouts shall undergo a significant transformation, conforming to stringent public health protocols and worker expectations. Employees can expect thermal screening on entering office buildings and may have to don masks and protective equipment at all times. Buildings might have to be disinfected at regular intervals, and visibly so, to appease worried employees. Companies may also have to keep ambulances on standby and offer substantial health benefits to attract employees. The possibility of rapid contagion would mean most companies shall have to instate wide-scale testing of workers at regular intervals. Intel, for instance, plans to screen its employees for COVID-19 symptoms regularly. Employees can also look forward to the probability of better-ventilated offices, as employers seek to ensure superior indoor air quality and circulation. The money would be well spent on UV air filtration systems and dehumidifiers, as it would have huge payoffs for employee health and productivity.
The focus must be on maximizing safety but also preserving a semblance of the collaborative and interactive benefits of being in an office space. Contactless entryways, less obtrusive furniture, and in-office video conferences instead of large meetings could be the new normal.
The future of workplace design appears to be mostly benign, if slightly awkward. However, a particularly disconcerting trend is also being catalyzed further by the pandemic—the rise of workplace surveillance.
5. Healthcare Delivery Must Embrace the Digital Space
The primary question asked was how technology could be ecologically harnessed for human development. A smart city would necessarily be a ‘green city’, run mainly on renewable resources. Also, it would be an ‘intelligent city’ powered by digital technology and knowledge. Being green and intelligent would pre-suppose that cities, with their dwellers and infrastructure, would be prepared to absorb and recover from economic, environmental, social, or governance-related shocks. An important measure to judge the ‘smartness’ of a city would be its resilience index. This index would be calculated by processing scores on key performance indicators falling under the risks mentioned above.
Smart cities of the COVID-19 and post-COVID-19 time must balance being intelligent, green, and healthy to stay steady in both calm and rough weather. If a city were an individual, a postulate from age-old Hindu philosophy would be invoked to determine its total well-being. Ayurveda says Satvamatma sariram ca trayamaitattri dandavat. Translated from Sanskrit, this means ‘as the tripod of mind, soul and body maintain the balance on which the living world stands’ . For a city, digital infrastructure will be a mark of its alert mind, going green will preserve its soul, and the health of its people will safeguard its body. It is, therefore, imperative that city development and urbanization embrace digital technologies in the delivery and consumption of health to be future-ready and relatively safe from new health exigencies.
5.1 Future of Healthcare: High-Touch and High-Tech
COVID-19 will transform such healthcare delivery from being predominantly physical to becoming a blend of physical and digital—’phygital’. Buttressed by technology, the essential nature of healthcare will continue to stay high-touch to become more patient-centric, whether virtually or physically. Healthcare can never entirely be in the digital space because of the apparent inability of conducting physical examinations during virtual consultations. Patients must be on-premises for, among other things, full clinical examination, advanced diagnostics tests, day-care procedures, and treatments.
COVID-19-induced behavioral transformations, such as the need for physical distancing and a heightened sense of hygiene and sanitation, will continue to remain necessary and non-negotiable elements of the care pathway to minimize the risk of infection spread at all layers and steps. No health system anywhere in the world has been able to withstand the test of COVID-19. Redefining the social order warrants a redesign of health systems to manage the increasing incidence of diseases within limited resources, with the added paranoia of transmission of infections.
5.2 Rethinking Cities for Connected Care
City design will have to be realigned to support a connected care ecosystem with a mix of physical and digital elements across the multi-pronged healthcare delivery value chain. As a kneejerk reaction to combat COVID-19, many countries have taken a platform approach for crisis management, where existing technology and assets have been leveraged to develop essential toolkits comprising the following elements:
Contact tracing apps.
Mobile technology and drones for surveillance.
Transformation of hotels and stadia into quarantine zones.
Segregation of COVID-19-only treatment wings within hospitals.
Harnessing 3D printing and robotics for ventilator design and production.
Enabling telemedicine practice with regulation changes.
Implementing rapid diagnostic techniques.
Testing existing combinations of anti-viral drugs and immune modulators as a potential cure cocktail.
Devising vaccine design and production approaches with a never-heard-before speed and international collaboration.
Several smart innovations and strategies have already been piloted during the crisis. As all cities prepare to move from crisis-control mode into a risk-acceptance mode in preparation for the new normal, long-term urban design adjustments are needed.
5.3 Preparing Health Workers for a Digital Future
As cities remodel infrastructure and prepare to slip into a method of operations governed by new rules to transform healthcare for the digital age, one must ask if the current healthcare workforce is prepared to deliver a digital future? The answer is no, in terms of the will and skill required to work with health-tech tools that run at the intersection of medicine and engineering, and use new-age technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and robotics. This field is in its nascent stages; however, there have been instances where AI-based diagnostic algorithms have conceptually matched or outperformed human judgment. For example, a deep-learning algorithm was able to detect lung cancer on a low-dose chest computed tomography.
COVID-19 has indeed thawed the digital inertia long enough for doctors and patients to embrace the benefits of technology. Telemedicine, a simple yet powerful tool in health-tech, has existed for more than three decades, but it has only been widely adopted during the COVID-19 crisis. The acceptance of this part-virtual mode of healthcare operation has encouraged and accelerated the notion of technology being an enabler rather than a replacer. Digital technologies will become an integral part of the new normal in healthcare. However, the use of telemedicine may not fully reflect the extent to which the evolving digital trends will soften the stand of the AI/ML contrarians in evaluating digital health as an opportunity and not a threat.
Irrespective of these views, it is the need of the hour to prepare health workers to become digital-savvy and technology-oriented. Health-tech must be introduced as a specialized subject in the medical, nursing, and paramedical curricula. Such healthcare professionals will be the most qualified to form a combination perspective on the digital health tools of the future and to provide a value-based assessment. More importantly, their evaluation will be drawn from the lens of patient-centricity, without having to cross the valley of traditional mindsets and technological apathy.
6. Conclusions
The presented research is a review on the impact of the Corona pandemic on cities and habitable spaces, and infrastructure development and how they can change after their passage from the perspective of planners and designers of cities and public places and trying to find new solutions that achieve a safe and effective environment for individuals.
Cities around the world have begun planning for recovery. Every step towards recovery helps to build a world beyond the COVID-19, and the success of these cities depends on anticipating global trends and transformations and the result will be a new kind of city capable of withstanding shocks such as the COVID-19 pandemic in a more stable way. The epidemic can be seen as an opportunity to rethink the design of cities to better prepare for future
crises.
Therefore, designers, planners, and public health officials should cooperate to build healthier cities during and after this crisis. More studies are required on improving the disease
prevention theory through good design of contemporary cities and researching health design strategies. Buildings should be built to be the secret weapon in the face of infectious diseases.
References
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/dept-of-design/how-the-coronavirus-will-reshape-architecture
https://www.orfonline.org/research/rethinking-cities-in-a-post-covid19-world-68736/
The COVID-19 pandemic: Impacts on cities and major lessons for urban
planning, design, and management-Ayyoob Sharifi, Amir Reza Khavarian-Garmsir
Post-Pandemic Cities - The Impact of COVID-19 on Cities and Urban Design -Sara Eltarabily, Dalia Elghezanwy
Using Behavioral Science to help fight the Coronavirus. Journal of Behavioral Public Administration, 2020 -
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