Urban Environment: Trends of Transformation in Times of Pandemic

Abstract

The period of pandemic self-isolation is characterized by a dramatic increase in virtual contacts and remote work. The pandemic has affected the traditional organization of processes in the urban environment, stimulated the development of some and suspended or stopped others. Three ways of their participation in the possible transformation of the environment were outlined in architecture, architectural environment design, urban planning: from a kind of socio-cultural design of space organization to the adaptation of buildings to new requirements, the development of futuristic projects.

The Coronavirus pandemic has affected seemingly immutable ideas about spatial structures and the very types of life and living in them. The megacity, so attractive as a center of growth and development, diversity of services and movement, increasing density of communications and building development, is losing its former universality, although not so clearly. In the months of self-isolation, there is a tendency for an "exodus" from big cities. A new spatial configuration of the system "work - home - rest" is being born.

Medical and biological requirements are forcing us to look for new types of quickly constructed buildings. Architects are faced with the task of finding housing types capable of providing people with various forms of contact with each other and with nature. Robotization is increasingly penetrating the services that accompany people's lives.

Possible trends in the transformation of the urban environment: interiorization, adaptation as a principle of sustainable architecture in the creation of new types and reconstruction of buildings, ecologization, the birth of new forms of urban structures in the development of digital economy and interaction with nature.