Probing the Relationship Between Pandemic and Urban Morphology

Since November 2019, the world has been dealing with the danger posed by the COVID-19 outbreak. As on date, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic had resulted in roughly 18.5 million confirmed cases and 40 million deaths worldwide. As a result, many researchers are striving to investigate the dynamics of the pandemic in urban areas in order to understand the impacts of COVID-19 on cities. Because of their high human density and economic activity, cities are generally held responsible for COVID-19 infections. Furthermore, metropolitan cities have received much interest, but small and medium towns with limited health facilities have been overlooked. Selecting Akola, a city that registered higher number of infections in the early period, aims to look at the relationship between the spread of COVID-19, the population density and the settlement pattern in case of small and medium towns using recorded infections from April 25, 2020 to September 28,2021. The study was conducted using a mixed method approach wherein through archival search and structured interviews it was found that pandemic spread is based on human contact which generated varying spreading patterns over the period of time. The analysis was done at three different levels namely the district level where the points of human contact were studied; at ward level wherein, it was attempted to attribute the cases of infection concentration and at three identified neighbourhood levels where the reasons for such human contact and identification of housing typology was done with the help of structured interviews. It is evident that the pandemic breakout is driven by connectivity rather than density because the more interconnected the places (whether compact or vast) in large urban regions are, the harder the pandemic hits such areas. These findings suggest that the spread of pandemic is not directly correlated with density and other morphological and geographical factors are responsible for human contact. the research is not a study on pandemic spread patterns but how the pandemic has given us the opportunity to probe the morphology of the city to learn the future structuring principles for urban design.