A Systematic Review of the Impact of the Built Environment on the Spread of COVID-19

ZHOU Qianfeng; GAN Xinyue

doi:10.3969/j.issn.1000-0232.2024.11.012

Abstract：Since the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic,the important role of the urban built environment in the spread of airborne and contact-transmitted infectious diseases has become the focus of research on healthy cities.However,existing research is still unclear about the key issues of the built environment affecting the spread of infectious diseases in the following aspects:(1)Which elements of the built environment have greater consensus in affecting the spread of infectious diseases?and(2)How do the impacts of the built environment on the spread of infectious diseases vary across study scales,periods of disease transmission,and other constraints?Therefore,this study aims to quantitatively and systematically review the empirical research articles in domestic and international journals on the relationship between the spread of infectious diseases represented by COVID-19 and the elements of the built environment.It analyzes the potential spatial pathways of urban built environments that affect the spread of infectious diseases to help formulate urban planning and design strategies to reduce the risk of infectious diseases spreading and provide references for the planning and design of healthy cities. This study reviews the literature by conducting a systematic review of relevant databases in the first instance;36 articles are screened and structured with information on research overview,methodology,scale differences,and characteristics of built environment elements.Considering that the differences in regions and period range can significantly affect the research results,as well as the difficulties in applying traditional meta-analysis methods in the review of articles in architectural disciplines,this study innovates a quantitative analysis of the literature results based on the systematic review.First,according to the data sources and research design in each screened article,the differences between the literature during the research design process and the standards that may affect the study results are summarized.Based on this,the formulation of each standard and the standards involved in the literature are scored.The built environment elements involved in each article are assigned a score based on the composite score.The scores are totaled according to their impact on the spread of infectious diseases in accordance with the promotion,inhibition,and total scores,and the built environment elements with a composite score of six or more are considered to have a significant impact on the spread of infectious diseases. The study results show:(1)The first-level indicators concerned by the relevant literature include road transportation,public service facilities,architectural spatial patterns,open space,land use,and housing.The evaluation indicators of the impact elements of the built environment involved mainly include green space area,land use mixing degree,road density,and building density.(2)In terms of impact results,the density of public transportation stops and restaurants facilitate the spread of diseases;the impacts of green space area and the density of commercial land use on the spread of diseases are more inclined to be inhibitory.(3)In studies at multiple scales,the same findings reached in the literature are that well-developed transportation promotes the spread of infectious diseases,and green space inhibits the spread of infectious diseases.(4)The impact of built environment elements on the spread of infectious diseases varies over time as the spread continues. Thus,the study summarizes the potential spatial paths of the built environment affecting the spread of infectious diseases based on the urban wind environment and proximity opportunities and proposes policy recommendations and planning design strategies based on these paths.