Re-designing the Built Environment as a Strategic Tool for Anticipating Emergency Situations: The Greek Strategy for Dealing with COVID-19 Crisis

Abstract

In recent years, there has been an exponential increase of hazards that may threat humanity in a global basis – depicting the correlation of climate crisis with the frequency and intensity of large-scale natural disasters recorded worldwide, like mega-fires, floods and hurricanes, with social, economic and environmental devastating consequences. However, apart from the aforementioned natural disasters and any possible technological hazards, humanity was recently threatened by the COVID-19 pandemic, facing the most challenging sanitary crisis of the latest years. Cities on a global scale need to adapt directly to the new extraordinary conditions, in order to meet the various challenges and minimize losses. The sudden and severe crisis of COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for rapid adaptive measures in order to increase societies’ coping capacity and strengthen urban resilience. In this paper, planning and re-designing of the existing built environment is proposed as a tool for anticipating a number of emergency situations that may arise in urban areas, including epidemic crises, whereby the case study presented concerns on Athens Metropolitan Area (AMA), in Greece. In this context, a number of pilot interventions have been proposed for the built environment in order to combat COVID-19 spreading, such as pop-up bike lanes, or pedestrian movement pathways, under the perspective of using less mass transportation means, supporting the “green transportation” of citizens, fostering well-being, securing undisrupted mobility of the supply chain, etc. All the above interventions could be seen as proposed good practices for cities’ adaption to extreme conditions, tailor-made to their specific needs. However, the challenge that remains is how to easily apply measures that could be proven useful in any type of emergencies in ensuring sustainable urban resilience, e.g. use a pop-up bike lane initially designed to anticipate a lockdown, as an emergency lane for ambulances in case that a mass casualty earthquake strikes, among others.