Predictions for architectural and urban spaces in response to the COVID-19 pandemic: Delphi survey of Korean experts

Studies on the factors of the COVID-19 pandemic that influence architecture and spaces have presented various, often contradictory, findings, and the same is true for studies making predictions. Considering this, this study aims to use the Delphi technique, an analytical method for synthesizing the opinions of experts across diverse fields to determine major issues in the COVID-19 and post-COVID-19 eras as wells as the architectural and urban spaces in which future changes are expected. This study derived keywords representing major trends and issues that would lead to changes in architectural and urban spaces in the COVID-19 and post-COVID-19 eras, predicted the change patterns for each keyword, and determined the architectural and urban spaces expected to undergo major changes. The experts predicted these keywords to show a variety of changes, including the pattern of increasing influence during the COVID-19 pandemic and then decreasing in influence after the pandemic, the pattern of small influence during the pandemic and the increase in influence after the pandemic, and the pattern of greater influence during and after the pandemic. Furthermore, they predicted that most of the post-COVID-19 changes would occur in the housing sector. Developing architectural guidelines that could incorporate these changes is thus necessary.