Professor Paul Lewis and Professor Guy Nordenson’s “Manual of Urban Distance: Strategies for Reconfiguring the City” has been selected for the Princeton University Funding Program for Rapid, Novel and Actionable COVID-19 Research Projects.

Lewis and Nordenson are one of seven teams awarded up to $100,000 for faculty-led research projects with the aim of accelerating solutions to the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Their research will address the challenges of physical distancing in urban settings and explore strategies that minimize the effects of potential resurgences of COVID-19 and other future pandemics.

Physical distancing is instrumental in slowing the transmission of COVID-19. Lewis and Nordenson’s proposal focuses on the fact that distancing has been especially crucial in the dense urban environments of cities as the rate of infection in the world’s cities greatly outpaces that of suburban or rural areas. The density of the city, which has historically been considered its greatest asset, economically, socially and environmentally, is now precisely at odds with the realities of a pandemic, and has become a crippling vulnerability.

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