COVID-19’s spatiotemporal patterns within cities: a global comparative study

The first confirmed cases of COVID-19 were discovered around the end of 2019 in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, and the world as we knew it changed from then on. Whereas most of the research has focused on the meso-urban scale, there is only a limited number of studies focusing on the distribution of cases at a spatially granular scale within cities, throughout time. This work aims at filling this gap, by drawing different cities across the globe into a comparative project, where the spread of the pandemic is analysed throughout three distinct ‘waves’ of the pandemic. This study sheds light on the current debate about the variability of results across time and space, and how insights need to be reframed by accounting for the spatiotemporal dynamicity of COVID-19.