Pandemics and Urban form: the Course of Empire

In March 2020 when COVID-19 arrived in Türkiye, Özyeğin University organised a multidisciplinary research team entitled Covid-19 Foresight and Solution Development
Team. Within that initiative, we proposed an international conference on Pandemics and
Urban Form in order to explore how the pandemic was affecting urban form and life in
different countries. It took a while to organise the conference, which had to be entirely
online. Due to the lockdowns affecting different countries, and the ongoing pandemic
travel restrictions, we organise the conference entirely online using the ZOOM platform.
By joining forces with INTBAU, UK; University of Trento in Italy, Nanjing University in China
Kuwait University in Kuwait, and University of Idaho in the United States, we are able to
organize this as an international event, including the four continents and we did. So i'm very grateful to the conference co-chairs: Mohammed Alajmi, Kuwait University, Kuwait; Mosè Ricci, University of Trento (now “Sapienza” University of Rome), Italy; Wowo Ding, Nanjing University, China and Xiao Hu, University of Idaho, United States for their cooperation in writing the conference call for papers which was launched in May 1st 2021. The call was organised on three different conference tracks: learning from history, shedding light on the contemporary world and the world is waiting for us to take action, in order to include history, social studies, design and planning, looking at the past, the present and moreover the future.