The role of the urban settlement system in the spread of Covid-19 pandemic. The Italian case

The paper proposes a focus on three main aspects related to the spread of the new coronavirus in our country: the correlations that have been established between the spread of the Covid-19 virus and the settlement system of our country; the urban and territorial phenomena that can be associated, positively or negatively, with the diffusion of the virus; and, finally, the correspondence between homogeneous clusters of Italian provinces (due to the current most significant urban phenomena) and the intensity and spread of the infection. The research is divided in four steps: the identification of the scientific and disciplinary approach, the definition of territorial areas and their descriptive variables, the choice of computational models, and the evaluation of the results. The main findings of the study highlight that significant correlations are not always identifiable between settlement characteristics and the spread of the infection. The diffusion of the new coronavirus is closely related to some of the main features of the demographic (e.g. people aged 65 years and above) and socio-economic (e.g. GDP for inhabitant) structure of the urban population