Pandemic disorientations and reorientations as legacies: Scoping review of COVID-19 impacts on European cities

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted modern urban ecosystems on an unprecedented scale. Many urban scholars have undertaken the challenge of documenting and analysing how this global health crisis has been experienced and coped with, resulting in a surge of studies on its impact on various cityscapes and domains of urban life. In this paper, we present findings from a scoping review of 138 articles on this subject published between the outbreak of the pandemic and the end of June 2022. Our review showcases scholarly accounts of cascading shifts that have occurred within urban ecosystems and provides a better understanding of conceptual and methodological alterations in research approaches. Because both the investigated impacts and the research strategies deal primarily with the consequences of losing the pre-pandemic spatial, temporal, social, cultural, and political frames of reference, we adopt transdisciplinary disorientation theories as the review’s interpretive framework. This step proves to be fruitful in mapping and interpreting crises and breakdowns and also in revealing how an unexpected planetary ordeal has reoriented pre-pandemic trends in urban development and transformed cities and urban life alike. We suggest that the disorienting pandemic experience can serve as a potent legacy for urban futures. However, the scale and distribution of post-pandemic reorientations across European cities and their residents cannot yet be fully comprehended.