Redefining Spaces

Shaping the future through Design Innovation

Pandemic Resilient Solutions for the Built Environment

At the launch of this pandemic resilience page in October 2020, it is still uncertain how the COVID-19 pandemic will pan out, hence even more challenging to predict with certainty what the ‘new normal’ will be after the great disruption.

Most analysts seem to support the notion of living with COVID-19 for a considerable period, with many scenarios projecting that COVID-19 will be brought under various degrees of control but not entirely eradicated, reducing it from being a pandemic to waves of epidemic.

Even if COVID-19 comes to pass, a future scenario of Disease X – a possibly serious yet unknown epidemic that is more deadly, more contagious, and mutates easily is always lurking in the shadow.

So the central question for societies and us as individuals is, since life has been changed forever by the COVID-19 pandemic with the need to be prepared for the next pandemic or epidemic, shouldn’t we view the necessary changes as opportunities to catalyst positive, long-term transformation that otherwise were difficult to implement?

In the context of the built environment, let’s start by developing Pandemic Resilience as a new dimension of urban resilience. As we find creative solutions, adapt our lifestyles, deploy technology, and develop new and improved processes towards pandemic resilience, there will be opportunities to engender long-ranging economic, social and environmental transformation, providing systemic solutions to social equity, ageing society, new energy, climate change, ecological regeneration, etc.

At CPG, to set ourselves thinking, our multi-disciplinary experts have responded by engaging in inter-disciplinary discourse internally and with our various stakeholders, so as to organise our ideas and thoughts about such possibilities. We share the ideas with the hope that it sparks more ideas, and invite like-minded people to collaborate and co-create solutions for complex problems.