Livable Density in the Post Pandemic City

Previous pandemics have impacted architecture and urban planning by stressing the importance of distance, day light, and fresh air in the built environment. Though Danish urban planning has thus traditionally strived towards relatively low density in urban environments, the discourse in architecture and urban planning has changed over the last decades favoring densification of neighborhoods for both environmental, economic, and social reasons. Yet, experiences from the Covid19 pandemic render it relevant to revisit prevalent understandings of urban density in relation to shared spaces, social infrastructure, and domestic boundaries. Based on architectural-anthropological case studies in various Danish neighborhoods, this paper explores how living in dense neighborhoods is experienced and remodeled during and after the pandemic lockdowns: What is livable density according to residents living in and professionals designing the city? Has Covid19 changed what living spaces are considered (too) dense, what spaces and functions people are willing to share, and how domestic boundaries are established? Is livability in small dwellings in dense urban neighborhoods dependent on local green areas nearby, on certain social networks, or on the access to a summerhouse outside the city? Tracing and mapping such networks and dependencies open new perspectives on livability and sustainability in the post pandemic dense city. Whereas existing research on urban density tends to focus on building density or population density, this paper uses the pandemic lockdowns as a prism for investigating the role of social infrastructure, shared spaces, and domestic boundaries in dense Danish neighborhoods.