Urban structure and mobility as vulnerability factors. Lima and Bogota in times of quarantine

The COVID-19 pandemic and the preventive measures that were adopted have had a wide range of consequences that went beyond health problems for the inhabitants of many cities around the world. In order to understand why the impacts on the dwellers' lives were so different within the city, we looked at pre-existing socio-spatial vulnerabilities, taking as an example the metropolises of Lima and Bogo-ta. We investigated the relationship between urban struc-ture, daily mobility patterns and the effects of COVID-19 during the 2020 quarantines. We adopted a multidimen-sional approach using census data, the latest available ori-gin-destination surveys, and the levels of contagion in both cities during 2020. Based on a factor analysis and a clus-ter analysis, we devised a typology and a synthetic map of pre-existing vulnerability factors. The results allow us to understand the role of these factors in the difficulties that the populations had to face during the quarantine, and why people living in the low-income outskirts suffered the worst disruptions in their daily lives.