Urban Planning to Prevent Pandemics: Urban Design Implications of BiocyberSecurity (BCS)

Recent pandemic complications have spurred significant conversation concerning how various organizations rethink their infrastructure and how people interact with it. More specifically, some city governments are considering how they can improve or re-purpose infrastructural design as they manage pandemics and potentially those to follow. In facilitating this effort, it is essential to look at effectively established principles and perspectives of modern designers to forge new functional and practical infrastructure that can accommodate behavioral changes within a pandemic. As smart cities increase in number, this is of particular concern due to their utilization of computing components in routine citizen and infrastructural interactions. This prevalent interface of citizens interacting with cyber-physical and remote cyber systems requires consideration of the intersection of biosecurity, particularly during a pandemic. Consequently, in this work, a proposed baseline by which city planners can draw inspiration for their efforts to boost resilience to pandemics is designed using First Principles, along with a collection of modern opinions. This exploratory work in progress aims to spur such questions in literature and provoke meaningful dialogue towards this endeavor.