Thriving Environments in a Post-COVID Era

Dear Colleagues,

COVID-19, after almost 18 months, is continuing to change, morph, and impact our built environments globally. The temporal and scale changes prompted by the pandemic are affecting all aspects of cities and our patterns of habitation within them. Working across time zones and geographies through extended confinement to our homes and immediate neighbourhoods has not only emptied our CBDs but initiated a global questioning at individual, organisational and government scales of the quality of cities and environments we occupy.

Seemingly overnight, the world is operating across temporal and geographic boundaries with unprecedented agility. The success of lockdown-induced working from home has disrupted commercial real estate, our CBDs, cities and suburbs and ultimately regional communities as people adapt and navigate the new spatial and temporal possibilities. Building technologies have accelerated their evolution and adoption in high traffic and high-risk spaces. Health risk mitigation measures have prompted rapid upgrades in ventilation systems, building materials and overall IEQ standards within commercial real estate, whilst WFH has illuminated new challenges posed by the poor IEQ of our residential environments. We have also become keenly aware of the importance of physical places to our wellbeing, sense of belonging and the connections, networks and communities they foster.

Thriving beyond these challenges requires both physical and psychological safety, adaptability and resilience to change. This calls for a holistic stock take and actions at the individual, organisational and city scale moving forward.

The aim of this Special Issue is twofold: Firstly, to capture snapshots in time of current research into the short-, mid- and long-term consequences emerging and impacting our post-2020 cities, built environments and expanding realm of places we occupy in our daily routines. Secondly, to propose answers to the question of what constitutes thriving environments and cities in the post-COVID-19 era. How can we create the highly adaptable and resilient built environments that the post-COVID-19 era demands?

We welcome original and diverse research contributions including—but not limited to—perspectives from people, architecture, buildings and material technologies to subjective investigations on cities, built environments and place on the following topics and themes:

• Technology as an enabler—objective and subjective approaches
• Workplaces, third spaces and performance
• Corporate real estate
• Residential design
• Building technologies and innovation
• Adaptability and resilience in future cities
• Tools, processes and methods for addressing challenges of environment quality
• Impacts on individuals, organisations and communities from cultural psychosocial dimensions

Dr. Christhina Candido
Guest Editor

Iva Durakovic
Guest Editor Assistant
[email protected]
Affiliation: Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture, Built Environment – University of NSW, Sydney, Australia

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Buildings is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• technology as an enabler—objective and subjective approaches
• workplaces, third spaces and performance
• corporate real estate
• residential design
• building technologies and innovation
• adaptability and resilience in future cities
• tools, processes and methods for addressing challenges of environment quality
• impacts on individuals, organisations and communities from cultural psychosocial dimensions