A Twin-Track Approach for Informal Settlements Restructuring in Response to the Impact of COVID-19: A Case Study

Introduction

Diseases shape cities (Das, Roy, Parvez, & Hasan, 2020). Epidemics such as the plague and the Spanish flu changed the cities' planning and conducted the shifts in building codes that are still in use today. Many cities, such as Paris, New York, and Rio de Janeiro, have been redesigned to include higher hygiene standards and to upgrade sewage facilities (UN-Habitat, 2020) . Urban planning and public health have been historically associated (Olszewska-Guizzo, Fogel, Benjumea, & Tahsin, 2022). The connection between these two terms in the calls of the early planning movement of the late nineteenth century helped reshape the urban form and influenced housing planning standards in rapidly developing European cities; to handle the concerns about public health and slum conditions (Scott, 2020). Consequently, city planning is critical for infectious disease management (AbouKorin, Han, & Mahran, 2021). Several urban planning innovations arose to respond to the health crises, such as the urban parks movement in the nineteenth century in the United States of America and the sewage system reform in Britain (Crompton, 2013; Bereitschaft & Scheller, 2020). While the pursuit of healthy and modern spaces was a major factor in the twentieth-century leap embodied in Howard's ideas of the Garden City and Le Corbusier's Social Housing, where cleanliness and moral health depend on the city planning, and the social unit becomes atrophied without them. The social unit “Neighborhood Unit” introduced by Clarence A. Perry illustrates the relationships between the residential components of the neighborhood and the various non-residential usages. The goal was to catch the daily services within a 5-minute walk as an integrated community based on self-sufficiency with open spaces and complete separation between vehicular and pedestrian traffic (Patricios, 2002; Mehaffy, Porta, & Romice, 2014). This theory provides a schematic guide to the space and facilities that can uphold routine life within spatial boundaries (Byun, Choi, & Choi, 2014). The neighborhood unit with the planning assets of the garden city formed the spatial patterns of the contemporary to generate the theory of new urbanism in an attempt to solve the problem of the garden city and modernity, which included new ways of thinking about the urban form (Jin, 2020). Hence, the decentralized city proposed establishing intimate settlements and distributing production, considering the negative impact of polluting industry on human health and creating a closer relationship between the city and the countryside. However, despite these good intentions, many of these spaces have not stood the test of time due to the gradual move away from health concerns and public health assets and the increasingly planning trend towards acting as a facilitator of market-led development. That is reflected in the increasing privatization of open and green spaces, poorly designed neighborhoods, low-quality housing, rapid planning with a rapidly increasing population, and urban sprawl (UN-Habitat, 2019; Okech & Nyadera, 2022). These issues are considered reasons that caused some urban developments since the 1960s in parallel with the increase in human activities and their effects on the environment to be effective in allowing the spread of epidemics, the latest but not least of which was Covid-19 (Scott, 2020; Pire & Boivin, 2020).