FINE-GRAINED PARALLELISM FOR POST-PANDEMIC CITIES: 12 DESIGN STRATEGIES FOR RESILIENT URBAN PLANNING

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we live in the city. Social distancing will remain as a provisional code of conduct for unforeseeable outbreaks of pandemic diseases in the future. Social distancing is predicated upon reduced density of people in any given space and time. Since urban sprawl has been proved to be unsustainable, spreading out the urban density to suburbs cannot be the right direction to achieve this. Fine-grained parallelism is proposed as a single theoretical framework for an alternative post-pandemic urbanism. It is a way of maintaining simultaneous movement and co-presence, two essential properties of urban living, without the risk of crowding, by reconceptualising the existing spatial setting in a finer resolution. Existing urban spaces that have been underused, ill-used or unused can be reconfigured to achieve fine-grained urbanism for the resilient post-pandemic city. © 2022 Malaysian Institute Of Planners. All rights reserved.