Beyond density: COVID-19 as an accelerator of spatial (in)justices.

Around the end of 2019, in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, the first confirmed cases of COVID-19 were identified, and from then on, the world we were used to knowing changed globally. The role of population density, in relation to the spread of the pandemic, has been widely scrutinised in urban studies, believed to be the triggering variable. However, the results so far are inconclusive. This paper suggests instead to shift the focus to socio-spatial vulnerabilities, as the effects of the pandemic's spread have been more severe in urban units which feature long-standing inequalities. The paper's aim is, therefore, twofold: on the one hand it aims at contributing to the debate on population density and COVID-19 in urban areas, and, on the other hand, to analyse the pandemic's spread in relation to socio-spatial vulnerabilities. Different cities across the globe are drawn into a comparative project, where the pandemic's spread is analysed in relation to variables of Population Density (PD) and a Social Vulnerability Index (SVI), by employing correlation matrices. The results suggest that there is no significant correlation between density and the spread of COVID-19. Instead, a positive correlation is in place when analysing the pandemic's diffusion with socio-spatial inequalities. • COVID-19 spread is not associated with population density while social vulnerability is found to be positively correlated. • The study invites to undertake a more critical understanding of how density and vulnerability are intertwined. • Measures based on physical concentration should be supplemented by topological density, made up of relational factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]