The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic On Cities. A Scoping Review Protocol

The aim of the scoping review is to map out evidence based research on the Covid-19 pandemic impact on the European cities. The review questions touch three broad areas of interest:

the aspects of urban life described and analysed  in publications on the impact of the pandemic on cities

the aspects of urban life that are described in terms of crisis, breakdown, turnaround, etc. (crisis, disruption, slump, shift…) in such studies

theoretical and methodological approaches applied in such studies

The search was conducted in June 2022, with the final body of literature consisting of 3,994 publication references from EBSCOhost, APA Psyc, Scopus, Web of Science, Proquest, Wiley, Sage, JSTOR, Tailor&Francis, Oxford Journals databases (Fig. 1). The following English words were searched for in titles, abstracts and keywords in the databases: (pandemic OR ‘Covid-19’) AND (city OR cities OR urban*). We used the following criteria for articles to be included in the study: 1) peer and non-peer-reviewed empirical papers in journals published in English from January 2019 to June 2022; 2) included studies where the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on European city/cities was an explicit variable of interest; 3) contained analysis of empirical data on cities or urban life retrieved or collected within and explicitly addressing the COVID-19 pandemic; 4) addressed the social, cultural, economic, political and socio-geographical aspects of a city. We excluded from our sample papers that were: 1) theoretical and opinion literature, media press releases, reports, MA dissertations and PhD theses; 2) secondary research papers (reviews, meta-analyses); 3) papers not in English; 4) studies about non-European cities; 5) studies which do not explicitly address the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on cities; 6) studies addressing a city as a variable of secondary importance; 7) studies outside the scope of the COVID-19 pandemic, published before December 2019; 8) studies not addressing the social or human aspects of urban life.

The final database of coded documents consisted of 138 empirical articles presenting findings on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on European cities.