**11. Conclusion**

Healthcare shape our cities and vice versa.

Although fighting against pandemics was traditionally associated with the built environment, the 20th century pharmaceutical progress allowed medicine to emancipate from architecture and urbanism. As WHO stated in 2018, "Will history repeat itself? The answer must be: Yes, it will [1]." Last decades evolutions which culminated with the COVID-19 pandemic stretched the role of a new interdisciplinary strategy in both combating and mitigating future outbursts.

There is an important COVID-19 scientific literature concerning pollution, green areas role, urban population density or air control that can be addressed mainly through built environment measures. These measures include air control, residential measures, public spaces, green areas design, working, transportation and mixed neighborhoods.

The COVID-19 pandemic dramatic implications can be also perceived as an opportunity for setting up a more stable health and built environment systems. Scientific evidence is not enough and it should be doubled by public awareness and by political implication. Otherwise, it may end like *The Great Illusion*, the 1910 book of the Nobel Prize winner Sir Norman Angell, which, although scientifically proved that economic interconnection among nations made future wars illogical and counterproductive, was followed by two World Wars.

*The Role of Architecture and Urbanism in Preventing Pandemics DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.98294*
