The failure of urban forms under the COVID-19 epidemic: towards a more just urbanism

The outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting mandatory socio-spatial practices trigger and pose some critical questions on the prevailing conventions of spatial planning approaches and the ways they shape our cities Most salient in this regard, though not exclusive, are the dominant planning approaches and movements of recent decades, such as New Urbanism and the various sustainability-related spatial-planning paradigms These approaches rely on the spatial aspects of density and compactness as mitigation and adaptation measures, aiming to achieve better social experiences in cities and to cope with climate change and its uncertainties Therefore, in the context of the current pandemic, we raise questions about the functioning, flexibility, structure, physical typologies and crisis-adaptation capacities of the existing urban form in cities around the world