The role of the design disciplines in times of pandemic. Relationship between legislative planning and urban form

Covid-19 has imposed a profound transformation on our lifestyles. As the months go by since the beginning of the Pandemic, the need to use public spaces, green areas, social spaces, and proximity services, has become fundamental. This new awareness imposes the need for a careful analysis of urban dynamics that does not relate to “here and now” but reflects on a medium-long term time perspective. During 2020 there were some moments in which we thought that the words “lockdown”, “social distancing”, and “pandemic” were only transient; now we understand how wrong this assumption was. Instead, 2021 was the year of awareness, the moment in which we became conscious that our way of inhabiting the earth was radically and structurally changing; the concept of “times of Pandemic” or “times of Crisis” has suddenly taken on an unexpected and unpredictable temporal value. The awareness of the need for a substantial change in our development paradigm was further shaken by the recent news related, to the war in Ukraine which highlighted the fragility of the current model of society, especially in the urban context. Thus, the concept of “Climate-Proof” or “Healthy Cities”, must be associated with that of “Pandemic-Proof” or “Crisis-Proof”, a city able of being resilient to unforeseen events ensuring the continuity and capillarity of services on the territory, both in terms of welfare and socio-economic and cultural dynamics. To do this, it is necessary to rethink the urban policies and instruments of the city government. But how? Which model can be taken as a reference framework? The answer is “Sustainability”, and the tool is constituted by the coherence processes of public policies for sustainable development. This paper is part of the research field that investigates how the role of design disciplines is changing in times of pandemic, with the aim to understand the relationship between legislative planning and urban forms for a new model of sustainable cities development.