| dc.description.abstract | The Coronavirus is a pandemic that defined the greatest crisis of the modern
world, and it is the most critical challenge that the world has faced since World
War II. Considering the effect and the scale of the outbreak, WHO declared
Covid-19 as a global pandemic and identified the epidemic as an unprecedented
socio-economic crisis and not just a health challenge. From early 2020, most of
the countries in the world have been in lockdowns to prevent the spread, and
these lockdowns critically restricted mobility resulting in empty city-scapes.
The critical problem of the present is the incompatibility of the city forms to cope
with the pandemic triggered by the inability to locate the ‘New Normal’ concept
in the field of Urban Design. Non-resilience of cities is not a unique case to this
pandemic but was common in the pre-pandemic world too. Modern cities being
dependent on auto-mobiles had created an urban crisis, and the desire of the
designers to initiate sustainable alternatives was always defeated by automobile
transportation. The pandemic has however created a temporary momentum
towards active transportation restricting car-travel, and the study identifies the
necessity of concreting these temporary trends for the long run. Analysing the
initiatives that the cities of the globe have taken, three main concepts could be
identified as cycling, Avoid-Shift-Improve paradigm and 15-Minute city. The
latter part of the study brings these concepts to the city fabric of Colombo and
concludes by stressing the compatibilities of adapting these concepts to
Colombo city. | en_US |
