| 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 cityscapes.
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 cartravel,
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 |
