Urban form and COVID-19 cases and deaths in Greater London: An urban morphometric approach

Alessandro Venerandi, Luca Maria Aiello and Sergio Porta

Environment and Planning B, 2023, vol. 50, issue 5, 1228-1243

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic generated a considerable debate in relation to urban density. This is an old debate, originated in mid 19th century’s England with the emergence of public health and urban planning disciplines. While popularly linked, evidence suggests that such relationship cannot be generally assumed. Furthermore, urban density has been investigated in a spatially coarse manner (predominantly at city level) and never contextualised with other descriptors of urban form. In this work, we explore COVID-19 and urban form in Greater London, relating a comprehensive set of morphometric descriptors (including built-up density ) to COVID-19 deaths and cases, while controlling for socioeconomic, ethnicity, age and co-morbidity. We describe urban form at individual building level and then aggregate information for official neighbourhoods, allowing for a detailed intra-urban representation. Results show that: (i) control variables significantly explain more variance of both COVID-19 cases and deaths than the morphometric descriptors; (ii) of what the latter can explain, built-up density is indeed the most associated, though inversely . The typical London neighbourhood with high levels of COVID-19 infections and deaths resembles a suburb, featuring a low-density urban fabric dotted by larger free-standing buildings and framed by a poorly inter-connected street network.

Keywords: Urban form; urban morphometrics; COVID-19; density; Greater London (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23998083221133397 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envirb:v:50:y:2023:i:5:p:1228-1243

DOI: 10.1177/23998083221133397

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Planning B
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().