What Has COVID-19 Taught Us? Student Housing in a Post-Pandemic Era

The Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdown have prompted critical reflections on how individuals live in their domestic environments. Within this debate, the Student Housing has assumed a crucial role, no longer merely functioning as a ‘safe place’ for night-time rest and meals, but also enabling a series of educational activities previously limited to separate functional structures. Covid-19 only intensified existing challenges faced by students and academic institutions well before the pandemic outbreak, such as the architectural design of university residences. The paper, as a result of ongoing research, aims to highlight the responses and novel requirements emerging from the unprecedented isolation caused by the pandemic and to exploit the gathered information to propose a series of possible strategic design solutions to improve the living environment in student residences in the post-pandemic aftermath. Furthermore, considering that many European countries are significantly increasing their investments towards this direction thanks to the EU Recovery Fund, it is hopeful that in the near future, there will be some substantial improvements.