Cities are generally defined as densely populated, well-developed commercial and industrial with large built-up areas of human settlement. Throughout human history, human settlement may allow cities to operate with higher operation efficiency and greater economy scales when compared to rural areas. However, urban regions are more prone to outbreaks of epidemic disease, which has led to much reflection and new explorations in urban construction ) (Megahed and Ghoneim 2020) (Spencer et al. 2020 (Xu et al. 2020 ). The epidemic has not only overwhelmed the health administrative department in the affected areas, but also has caused significant losses to other departments, including the economy, education, tourism, and the construction industry ). According to the Congressional Research Service (2020), 24% reduction of annual global gross domestic product (GDP) was resulted from COVID-19, with an additional 13%-32% decline in global trade (Mollalo, Vahedi and Rivera 2020).As an important production department of the national economy, the epidemic outbreak has posed new challenges to the urban design and architecture (Allam and Jones 2020) (Haleem et al. 2020 ). How to reduce the risk of epidemic spread and restore economic growth by optimizing urban planning and architectural design has become an urgent topic in the post-epidemic era (Megahed and Ghoneim 2020). The purpose of this paper are to (1) call for the inclusion of epidemics and other diseases into urban disaster management strategies; (2) provide reference for the prevention and control of epidemic cities and even the response strategies to major urban disasters by considering the reform of urban construction; (3) help and facilitate the process for the creation of healthy and safe urban living environments.
enhancing disaster prevention capacity and standards J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f Throughout history, urban planning and architectural design have always been concerned with the destruction caused by natural disasters in cities (Okubo 2016 ).
According to 'The Ten Books on Architecture' written by Vitruvius, cities and towns should be built in "healthy locations, high altitude, no draft and fog, and oriented neither cool nor warm" (Kim 2019) . Historically, one of the important motivations of urban and architectural advances is the ability to improve disaster prevention capacity and standards (Megahed and Ghoneim 2020). Each major epidemic brings new challenges to architecture and urban design, and its opportunities to update and improve concepts, methods and code standards (Ahsan 2020) (Randremanana et al. 2019 ).
In 1478, the plague struck Milan, Italy and caused 22,000 deaths (the total population of Milan was about 150,000 at that time). Leonardo da Vinci then became interested in sanitation and urban planning and used sketches and written notes to show an ideal urban plan for building along the riverbanks (Joseph 2012) . Instead of focusing on cathedrals and palaces, this planning divided Milan into ten new towns, each with 5,000 houses and a maximum of 30,000 inhabitants. This is the planning concept to reduce the risk of epidemic spread through urban cluster zoning. From June to December 1665, the plague caused 90,000 deaths in London and in 1666 the Great Fire of London made 80,000 people homeless (Benevolo 1983) . Two catastrophes led Wren to devise a plan for the rebuilding of London (Morris 1994) , replacing "crowded buildings and crooked lanes" (Once responsible for the outbreak of the plague and the spread of fire) with "wide streets and rich spaces". The planning concept aimed to reduce the risk of disasters, casualties and economic losses, which made an important impact on urban planning in later years.
Severe public health problems and their response have not only contributed to the formation and development of the modern public health discipline, but also indirectly led to the birth of modern urban planning. Therefore, modern urban planning and design need to pay constant attention to public health and environmental health conditions, in J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f addition to social, economic and technological development motivations (Peng et al. 2012 ). In the pre-industrial era, extreme overcrowding, lack of necessary sanitation, and lack of health knowledge were the main causes of poor living conditions in Europe's industrial cities (Benevolo 1983 ). In 1854, cholera epidemic in London was mainly caused by contamination of drinking water with faecal matter (Howard et al. 2000) . In addition, the main transmission methods of typhoid fever, bacterial dysentery (Hu et al. Modern cities generally adopt the functional zoning of "work, residence, recreation and transportation" as well as the planning and design of 'sunshine, air and greenery' as proposed in the Athens Charter of 1933 (Le 1973 ). An important catalytic factor is the creation of a healthy living environment. By linking and interacting human beings with J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f nature and the environment (e.g. physical environment, ecological environment, etc.), a harmonious and unified ideal environmental state can be formed, thus implementing scientific urban planning, optimizing habitat construction, and improving urban health.
China now has a clear disciplinary field of "healthy city" (Chen 2015) , the country has 
Natural disasters, such as floods, typhoons and earthquakes, are characterized by high frequency of occurrence, wide geographical distribution and large economic losses, which seriously endanger the health and life safety of human (Boustan et al. 2020 To sum up, the mechanical mind which was once effective in the era of modernism (e.g. the rational-centric model of urban construction based on formulas, theorems, rules and the like certainty and continuity), it is no longer fully capable of coping with the today's 'black swan' sudden disasters (meteorological, epidemiological, etc.) that are increasingly subject to a high degree of uncertainty, along with 'frog boiling' and 'grey rhino' urban disasters (i.e. cumulative outbreaks). With the increasingly in-depth digital era, a 'digital cloud' can be formed through CIM technology, which is able to realize the cross-validation of information from different systems and the use of iterative algorithms to obtain the optimal value interval with the interaction of 'point, line, network and cloud'. Then, based on the existing scientific planning and prevention for several single disaster targets, it is possible to construct more complex prevention and control modes for integrated urban disaster preparedness. This could further achieve a compatible unity with instrumental-rational and value-rational multiobjectives under the guidance of probability theory, through which the comprehensive optimal of the global system should be put in priority based on the equilibrium of disaster occurrence probability and stop loss cost.
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.