Abstract
ABSTRACT During the first wave of COVID-19, residents’ health and well-being were challenged as residential environments suddenly had to accommodate most of the functions of an urban system. Although scholars and practitioners have proposed reconsidering dwelling requirements, their top-down approach overlooks the agency of residents whose preferences might have changed during the confinement. This paper investigates the effects of the first wave of COVID-19 on residential preferences in Switzerland. Adopting a systems perspective, we use an online survey of residents (N = 5378) to explore the extent to which the functions assigned to ideal dwellings have changed during the pandemic and relate these shifts to socio-demographic characteristics, changes in leisure activities, and respondents’ environment conditions. Results indicate that at least one ideal function changed in importance for 60% of the respondents. The desire for a place for self-representation increased, whereas a place for meeting basic needs evinced the largest loss in importance. Our regression models enable us to identify two profiles of residents who responded differently to residential stress. We argue that housing owners, practitioners and policy-makers should empower inhabitants to respond to current and future challenges by acting on and changing their residential environment for their health and well-being.
Highlights
A healthy urban system enables people to perform all the functions of life and develop to their maximum potential (Hancock and Duhl 1986, Hancock 1993, Gatzweiler et al 2017)
Practitioners and scholars have proposed to reconsider the requirements of residential buildings by predominantly focusing on dwelling features that could solve the deficiencies revealed during the COVID-19 experience, e.g. lack of comfort, virus propagation, or increased energy usage
To measure changes in residential preferences, par ticipants were first asked about the kind of dwelling they considered as ideal before the COVID-19 pan demic, and about the type they would choose if they were to move after the ‘crisis’
Summary
A healthy urban system enables people to perform all the functions of life and develop to their maximum potential (Hancock and Duhl 1986, Hancock 1993, Gatzweiler et al 2017). Practitioners and scholars have proposed to reconsider the requirements of residential buildings by predominantly focusing on dwelling features (e.g. room layouts, indoor air qual ity) that could solve the deficiencies revealed during the COVID-19 experience, e.g. lack of comfort, virus propagation, or increased energy usage (see Tokazhanov et al 2020 for an overview). This linear top-down approach overlooks the com plexity of the housing system and its dynamics, as it does not consider potential changes in residents’ preferences during the confinement. Long advocated in the ‘residential context of health’ (Hartig and Lawrence 2003, Lawrence 2006, 2021b), and more recently in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic (Gatzweiler et al 2020, Lawrence 2020, Rippon et al 2020), a systems perspective recognizes people as agents of change for their health and well-being
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