Page 70 - JCAU-5-3

Journal of Chinese

Architecture and Urbanism

ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Spatial scale plasticity of urban residential

areas: Lessons from Shanghai’s model in
response to COVID-19

Fan Yang*, Zhi Wei, and Jiayin Wang

Department of Urban Planning, Tongji University, Shanghai, China

Abstract

Shanghai’s measures to address the COVID-19 pandemic since March 2022 have
attracted world-wide attention. The response to public emergency and pandemic
in built environment has prompted a profound reflection in residential planning.
This case study investigated an under-developed site located in Shanghai’s Huangpu
River waterfront. Based on a site survey, interviews, the phased lockdown policies
of different urban areas, and published data on the spatial distribution of infection
cases, this paper analyzes the effectiveness of strategies for coping with different
stages of epidemic spread at different spatial scales. In addition to ensuring the
privacy of living quarters, our residential planning ensures the flow and social
communication of people in different neighborhoods, achieving the resilience of
local lockdown and flow. This study redefines the openness and reasonable scale of
*Corresponding author: residential areas based on analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of gated
Fan Yang and block residential areas facing pandemic. This paper analyzes the feasibility
(fanyangsh@tongji.edu.cn) of a residential site plan based on the above conception, which has spatial scale
Citation: Yang, F., Wei, Z., & composable features for the basic residential building groups. This study emphasizes
Wang, J. (2023). Spatial scale that design should be considered to achieve the flexibility of spatial scale through
plasticity of urban residential areas:
Lessons from Shanghai’s model in the different assembling pattern of basic-living-space-unit.
response to COVID-19. Journal of
Chinese Architecture and Urbanism,
5(3):1242. Keywords: Spatial scale plasticity; COVID-19; Residential building groups; Space
https://doi.org/10.36922/jcau.1242 responding model; Shanghai
Received: July 4, 2023
Accepted: August 4, 2023
Published Online: August 25, 2023 1. Introduction
Copyright: © 2023 Author(s). Pandemics are responsible for the greatest risk of mortality worldwide for most of the
This is an open-access article
distributed under the terms of the human history (Farquhar et al., 2017). The COVID-19 pandemic, which broke out in
Creative Commons Attribution- the early 2020s, caused more than 567 million confirmed cases and 6.3 million deaths
Non-Commercial 4.0 International by July 2022 . Urban built environments tend to be more vulnerable to pandemic due to
1
(CC BY-NC 4.0), which permits all
non-commercial use, distribution, their high population clustering and mobility. Although the correlation between urban
and reproduction in any medium, density and infection or fatality rates is inconclusive (Boterman 2020; Hamidi et al.,
provided the original work is 2020; Sharifi & Khavarian-Garmsir 2020), outbreaks in urban informal settlements or
properly cited.
slums, workers’ dormitories in Singapore, and prisons in the United States are reminders
Publisher’s Note: AccScience of the impact of living environment on the transmission of COVID-19 (von Seidlein
Publishing remains neutral with
regard to jurisdictional claims in
published maps and institutional 1 https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/weekly-epidemiological-update-on-
affiliations. Covid-19 [Last accessed 2022-07-27].

Volume 5 Issue 3 (2023) 1 https://doi.org/10.36922/jcau.1242