Dissecting the role of urban form and human mobility in the spreading of COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has left no country untouched affecting people’s routines over the globe. The mobility of the population is identified as a fundamental driving force for the dissemination of the COVID-19 at both regional and local levels. This work dissects the integrated impact of urban form and human mobility in the spreading of COVID-19 within cities. Namely, systematically exploring the effects of human mobility imposed by the diverse urban patterns in regards to the distribution of population and job locations. To this end, we first present novel insights of the interaction between inhabitants’ mobility behavior and their places of residence in 21 cities, characterizing their urban structures ranging from monocentric to polycentric forms. Inhabitants in more polycentric cities have more homogeneous distribution of radius of
gyration. Further, we measure population’s response to travel restrictions via changes in the distribution of travel radii with and without the quarantine scenario. Next, we model the early-stage and time-varying reproduction numbers as a combination of urban form and mobility predictors in eleven cities. By introducing the newly proposed mobility measures, generalized linear models achieve good performance both for the early-stage (rho = 0.98) and daily reproduction numbers (rho = 0.86). Our study informs the value of mobility-defined urban form in the spreading of a pandemic in diverse cities. These dynamic measures merit great attention for scenario analysis of urban mobility coupled with containing the epidemic spreading.