The COVID-19 pandemic revealed many vulnerabilities of the contemporary built environment along with limited preparedness and low efficiency in mitigating unexpected and unprecedented challenges. This article discusses the efficiency and responsiveness of basic hospital spatial layouts in three different scenarios: normal operation; the segregation of a large number of patients and still providing them with access to emergency healthcare, typical for a pandemic; and a sudden, extremely high number of admissions typical for compound disasters and terrorist attacks. A set of parameters and a method for general adaptability assessment (GAAT) that can be used as a tool in decision-making processes as well as evaluation of both existing facilities and the new models for resilient hospitals resulting from the experience of the pandemic are proposed. The paper emphasizes why factors among which adaptability, convertibility, and scalability should be at the very core of hospital development and management strategies. It also discusses new models of adaptable healthcare facilities that enable day-to-day operations to continue alongside a pandemic, and other emergency scenarios.

This paper presents the geography of the historic central district of Kraków, Poland before, during and after the first wave of the 2020 pandemic. It describes how the disneyfied main part of the UNESCO heritage site of universal values turned into a ghost town as functional changes were turning into physical ones amid restrictions. From the results of pre-pandemic processes (that, as we argue, turned the city into its disneyfied version), to the lockdown (that later revealed itself to be but the first one in a row), to the post-lockdown recovery, these changes are presented in modified figure-ground diagrams with accessibility being defined by both tangible and intangible properties. The results are set against the background of the city’s current policies regarding economic recovery, mobility and accessibility to urban green areas. As an attempt to address the present vulnerability of the once resilient historic city centres—of which Kraków Old Town is a luminous example—this paper tends to be a voice in the debate on the post-2020 planning and the strategies we will need to face the subsequent waves of this, or other, pandemics as well as consequences of climate change.