A high level of connectivity is one of the key objectives in the planning and design of many urban developments. However, during an epidemic event, a frequent practice to control the spread of the disease is to control the access, e.g., through measures of safe distancing (social distancing) or zone isolation (lockdown). These measures conflict with the objective to increase the connectivity of spaces, i.e., the increment of connectivity would also increase the possible movement of people between places and thus increase the risk of disease spreading. Therefore, the evaluation of the development layout and the resilience of its spatial network with the consideration of both connectivity and separation becomes an important task. To understand how the connectivity of spaces affects the spread of a disease, this paper proposes an analytic framework based on the spatial mapping of human movement at the urban and architectural scale. This approach allows for the evaluation of the effects of isolating spatial nodes on the disease spreading process in a spatial network. Our paper explores how the connectivity of nodes affects people flow and identifies the morphological and typological features of a spatial layout that relates to that connectivity. Next, it evaluates the dynamic effects of altering the network structure on movement and clustering of people through a series of link removal analyses. Our findings suggest that for the scale of our case study, a compact university campus in Singapore, complete zone-separation or isolation measures may not be necessary. Instead, breaking the high edge-betweenness links can increase the spatial separation while reduce physical interactions and close contacts by forcing people to take less frequented route detours. By framing the spaces of such a built environment as a complex adaptive system, the results provide important insights into human-centered design and interventions for public health at the building and urban scale.

KEYWORDS: Spatial connectivity, lockdown, disease control, post-pandemic, COVID-19