According to the study, neighborhoods with generally lengthier travel durations to employment, ranging from 40 mins to an hour, are more prone to develop communicable diseases hotspots.
As per Cornell urban design, architecture, and global health specialists, long travel durations and home congestion could be excellent indicators of a greater proportion of transmittable coronavirus infections in metropolitan settings, as per a July study published in the journal Buildings and Cities.
Long Commutes, Crowded Homes Can Lead To COVID
“We’re attempting to figure out how the built environment affects coronavirus spread,” said senior author Timur Dogan, an assistant professor of architecture at the College of Architecture, Art and Planning.
The study, titled “Urban Design Attributes and Resilience: COVID-19 Evidence from New York City,” was released on July 6 in order to provide guidelines for both short reactions in the swift recovery from the COVID-19 emergency and lengthy urban layout and making plans choices for an adaptable, encompassing, and viable urban setting in prospective health emergencies.
“We found that high residential density and a high percentage of people commuting by public transit do not relate to a higher COVID-19 case rate,” Dogan said. “Household overcrowding and longer commute times appear to impair the pandemic resilience of individual families, medically vulnerable communities and cities, as a whole.”
In urban areas, the distance that one has to travel for different reasons is in kilometers commonly. The homes are costly and small which leads to congestion at home also. These two are the main factors that lead people to infection and they keep continuing. Hence there is no improvement n the city areas as far as the cases of new infection are concerned. If people avoid such long commutation and stay in an open place with a distance to each other the situation may get improved quickly.
Whenever it comes to global epidemic planning and design, in-home overcrowding and urban densities are two connected but distinct ideas. As per the study, markers of overcrowding, such as the number of units per structure and the number of people per room, are linked to coronavirus spread.
The average COVID-19 incidence in New York City, on the other side, was not connected to neighborhood residential development, as increased concentration sometimes includes other favorable urban elements that were beneficial for epidemic resistance.
“High-density neighborhoods aren’t necessarily bad from a disease transmission perspective,” said Dogan. “A well-mixed neighborhood in a city could be beneficial.”
A computer-aided design software program named Urbano, created by main author Yang Yang, a doctorate researcher in system design and a research scientist at Dogan’s Environment Networks Laboratory was used to generate the areas of interest-related movement statistics used in this work.
The researchers merged ZIP code tabulated location data with other accessible urban statistics to see how dense population and overcrowding influenced incidence, as well as how the geographical extent of sites of interest like grocery shops, shopping malls, and playgrounds influenced disease rates.
“The Urbano software assists with collecting, simulating, and analyzing urban mobility data,” Yang said. “It allows mobility-aware decision-making for designers and planners in building a sustainable and resilient city.”
Said Dogan: “This is where we start the idea of the 20-minute city, a concept where a person can fulfill all the daily errands, work, and daily needs within a 20-minute walk or bike ride.”
“This kind of urban design paradigm promises benefits that make our cities more livable, sustainable, and resilient,” he said. “Professional urban planners say that active mobility is a healthy thing to do. If we can reduce vehicle traffic, we can reduce pollution and reduce energy demand, we can get a healthier population.”
