During the COVID-19 pandemic, physical distancing, mobility restrictions and self-isolation measures were implemented around the world as the primary intervention to prevent the virus from spreading. Urban life has undergone sweeping changes, with people using spaces in new ways. Stockholm is a particularly relevant case of this phenomenon since most facilities, such as day care centres and schools, have remained open, in contrast to cities with a broader lockdown. In this study, we use Twitter data and an online map survey to study how COVID-19 restrictions have impacted the use of different locations, services and amenities in Stockholm. First, we compare the spatial distribution of 87,000 geolocated tweets pre-COVID-19 and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Second, we analyse 895 survey responses asking people to identify places they ‘still visit’, ‘use more’, ‘avoid’ and self-report reasons for using locations. The survey provides a nuanced understanding of whether and how restrictions have affected people. Service and seclusion were found to be important; therefore, the accessibility of such amenities was analysed, demonstrating how changes in urban habits are related to conditions of the local environment. We find how different parts of the city show different capacities to accommodate new habits and mitigate the effects of restrictions on people’s use of urban spaces. In addition to the immediate relevance to COVID-19, this paper thus contributes to understanding how restrictions on movement and gathering, in any situation, expose more profound urban challenges related to segregation and social inequality.

This paper describes a new approach in urban ecological design, referred to as social–ecological urbanism (SEU). It draws from research in resilience thinking and space syntax in the analysis of relationships between urban processes and urban form at the microlevel of cities, where social and ecological services are directly experienced by urban dwellers. The paper elaborates on three types of media for urban designers to intervene in urban systems, including urban form, institutions, and discourse, that together function as a significant enabler of urban change. The paper ends by presenting four future research frontiers with a potential to advance the field of social–ecological urbanism: (1) urban density and critical biodiversity thresholds, (2) human and non-human movement in urban space, (3) the retrofitting of urban design, and (4) reversing the trend of urban ecological illiteracy through affordance designs that connect people with nature and with each other.

The village of Duved in northern Sweden faces rapid transformation related to the tourism industry, including new housing and recreational facilities in the mountains. Existing places with inherent social values that play a key role in supporting local identity are threatened as they are not sufficiently recognised or protected by the planning process. This study focuses on how significant places with social values, and the system of such places that form a social infrastructure, may be identified and recognised through a multi-perspective approach including a creative mapping process. Information from different stakeholders about places with social values is documented and analysed. The approach includes three different perspectives on places affording social values: planning documents, the officials’ perspective and the citizens’ perspective. The mapping method makes intangible knowledge visible and reveals the multifunctionality of places, and the map constitutes the medium for such a process. It can contribute to developing democratic planning processes that support the empowerment of the population and help professionals to integrate knowledge about social value into plans, thus preserving fragile but essential qualities through future development. Practice relevance Centring on the ongoing rapid transformation of Duved village in northern Sweden, this study focuses on how significant places with social values may be identified, recognised and preserved. Places affording social value, important for sustaining local communities and wellbeing, are often insufficiently acknowledged in times of forceful urban development. These oversights can have devastating consequences for the existing social qualities. The creative mapping approach captures three perspectives to identify significant places affording social values. In this way, maps translate intangible knowledge into analytic methods of planning. The result may support the integration of fragile but essential qualities into plans and policies and is a way forward to acknowledge and preserve key places in future urban development.

The COVID-19 pandemic profoundly reshaped everyday life and urban activity patterns. This study examines how changes in urban place use during the first year of the pandemic in Stockholm related to subjective wellbeing and to the characteristics of the urban environments people visited or avoided. Using self-reported data from an online PPGIS map-based survey (n=650 respondents; 2,379 marked places), we examine how built environment attributes and activity purposes characterize places that people used or avoided during the pandemic and how these characteristics relate to perceived wellbeing impacts. Bayesian spatial mixed-effects logistic regression models are used to estimate associations between wellbeing outcomes and environmental features such as population density, accessibility to services, and proximity to natural elements. The results show that the pandemic confined mobility to areas closer to home and shifted use toward greener, less dense environments. Abstaining from places used for meeting friends and family or group activities was strongly associated with perceived negative impacts on wellbeing, whereas visiting places for liveliness, group activities, seclusion, or meeting friends and family was associated with positive impacts. Essential service destinations were used frequently but exhibited a negative association with positive feelings. Overall, the findings highlight the importance of local access to both everyday services and restorative, nature-rich environments for supporting daily living needs and safeguarding subjective wellbeing during crises, and point to people-centered, place-based urban design and planning strategies that enhance urban health and resilience.