Questioning about the architectural and urban design during
the pandemic
Carlo Quintelli, Marco
Maretto, Enrico Prandi, Carlo Gandolfi
Fig.
1 - Antonello da Messina, San Girolamo nello studio, 1474-1475.
National Gallery of London.
The aim of
this call is to
solicit critical and proactive reflection on the part of architectural
culture, and in particular that of architectural and urban design, on
the phenomena triggered by the coronavirus pandemic which, as we write
this text, sees us still in an emergency phase but with our sights set
on a future regarding which a varied set of possible scenarios and
perspectives is already developing. A contribution which, moreover,
would like to attempt to compensate for the marginality of our active
knowledge compared to others that today are much more strongly called
upon to provide answers, not only for the immediate future, in the
fields of bio-medics and pharmacology, new technologies, economics and
social behaviour. The coronavirus problem, or rather a set of phenomena
which are the effect but also the cause of that problem, to be tackled
more and more in a global perspective without forgetting to also find
adequate answers in the local dimension, certainly involves aspects
related and strongly incidental to habitation logics and living in
built-up areas as well as to those of a social, environmental and
climatic nature. The contribution of architectural and urban forms will
therefore be of no little importance in contributing to providing an
effective response to the pandemic problem, seen not only from a viral
perspective. Even more so, if we are able to propose new or
rediscovered models, of both a futuristic and a historical nature,
through a process of circumstantial criticism of the neo-liberal
dynamic of understanding the city and its architecture and in general
regarding the entire territory in a delicate balance between
anthropization and nature. It thus becomes a matter of understanding,
researching and elaborating habitation strategies, flow modes, urban
layouts and forms, new types from the dwelling unit to collective
spaces and structures, according to a multiscale logic able to
encourage the systematic nature of the project as a prerequisite for
its strategic effectiveness, both with respect to the upcoming
emergency and to an overall improvement of urban life within a (sole)
reformed "normality".
If we consider space as the raw material of architectural and urban
design, the definition of which in a complete form has largely
distinguished the material identity and the civil expression of social
processes, we could well immediately ask ourselves whether the
pervasiveness and strength of the historical accident of the
coronavirus pandemic could, or perhaps should, open a new phase in the
conception of inhabited space at all the scales and in all the contexts
of global geography. Can the question therefore be recognized in
epochal terms, i.e., from a perspective of significant if not radical
change?
On the other hand, there is no doubt that the pandemic phenomenon,
already yesterday, still today no less than tomorrow, is part of
evident critical planetary situations with heavy negative repercussions
for local realities: on social, economic, environmental and climatic
levels, against a background of uncontrolled demographic growth in many
parts of the world. No less uncontrolled is the relationship between
anthropization and habitation logics, according to a use of space that
corresponds more to the opportunism of exploitation, in its different
forms, than to the satisfaction of the primary needs of the entire
population understood in its different cultural and civil identity
aspects.
The question of the next upcoming space over which we should ponder
therefore falls within a very vast phenomenological framework, the
contradictions of which are highlighted precisely by the emergence of
the virus, which on the one hand reveals to us, were it necessary, the
corollary of critical conditions of which the pandemic is above all an
effect rather than a cause, and on the other hand conveys us to a
dimension so complex and multifactorial that, we must admit, it is not
easy to outline and give effect to the action of the project on a level
of renewed rationality.
It also seems evident, in this sanitary juncture capable of involving
our own bodies and the places in which they live, but also of
determining reactions and releasing energies, might we say, of the
entire human race, that the architectural and urban component, as a
science applied to the design of inhabited space, is perceived as
lateral and accessory, not included in the basket of scientific fields
called to give short and long-term answers such as epidemiology and
health in general, but also economic, statistical rather than
socio-political and institutional forms, psychological, communication
and not least the new technologies and environmental sciences. On the
other hand, this is evident not only now if we consider, for example,
the total absence of "architecture and urban spaces" within the
research topics characterizing the mission of the ERC (European
Research Council).
In actual fact, architectural and urban science, and the project
instrumentation intrinsic to it, contributes significantly to the
determination of concentrated, urban or widespread habitation
procedures, with the involvement of the surrounding area, and therefore
to the organization of behaviour and social functions, to the
relationship between man-made spaces and natural spaces, in general to
forms of life and therefore to the well-being of the population. A
science, as demonstrated by its historical tradition which, starting
from the criticism of 19th century urbanisation through the models of
industrial modernity and the new standards of public hygiene in the
city, reaches the experimentation of collective living, of
disurbanisation rather than the rediscovery of the morphological and
life dimension of the historical city. A laboratory full of critical
and propositional contributions on how to organize and shape built-up
areas which seems to have lost its role on the stage of public
planning. And this should give rise to further questions, and perhaps
to self-criticism, on the causes of this scientific laterality
cultivated, among other causes, through the trivialization of
professions or pseudo-scientific nature created at mass media level
which, for example, promotes alleged environmental sustainability in
reality only suitable for gathering the most naive consensus.
The architectural and urban project cannot at this juncture only be
called upon to reiterate the generalized hope of a so-called return to
"normality" instead of a generic "restart", watchwords that certainly
do not help in any way to analyse and take steps forward, with
awareness and authentic critical investigation, as regards the most
appropriate guidelines and criteria to deal with the current critical
situation but especially that of the future and not only in terms of
pandemic risk.
Starting, therefore, from a point of view which has not been completely
identified and rather aimed at understanding the structural nature of
the open questions, two distinct but complementary ways exist of
looking at the problem, to be addressed starting from the "coronavirus"
contingency.
The first is that of the predisposition of criteria and instruments
which the forms of anthropized space can assume so as to face and make
themselves as resistant and resilient as possible to phenomena of this
nature, without forgetting other causes of risk determination on a
global scale, starting from climate change. It is the dimension of an
architecture and a city predisposed towards defence and therefore able,
in addition to other organisational factors with a functional and
material predisposition, to cope with the emergency by reducing its
negative effects and consequent social costs. Collective urban spaces
and equipment, predisposition and multi-functionality of places and
architecture in the city, forward-looking configuration of designed
housing and workplaces able to achieve in a systemic way the best
possible response to the emergencies to come. A reflection that cannot
but be multiscale, from architecture to the city, but we could also say
from the inside to the outside: from the architecture of habitation
that affects us all as users of domestic spaces that in this situation
have been severely tested and where the theme of an "Existenzminimum"
also suitable for conditions of segregation/quarantine emerges, up to
the spaces of the city also invested by typologically unforeseen needs,
starting from hospitals, but also commercial buildings, schools,
workplaces, and where the theme of the predisposition to the rapid
transformability of the city in emergency conditions can be included
among the strategies of the project to be developed. In architectural
and spatial (and not only conceptual) terms it would be a question of
evaluating a subversion between full and empty spaces, of temporary
alteration of the density of uses and population of the spaces
themselves. This means that the residential district and the individual
housing will no longer be just places to live in, but also places to
work, and that it will be necessary to reflect on the change of
gradient on the endowments of the immediate inhabited community.
The second is more concerned with the root causes that generate the
pandemic risk (and not only) to which the forms of settlement and
inhabited and in any case anthropized places also actually contribute,
as demonstrated by the genesis of the coronavirus which not
surprisingly arose from the metropolis of Wuhan and from the many urban
villages that constitute its marginal and degraded aspect. This theme,
on the one hand, highlights the problem of the critical production and
social-housing problems of large urban agglomerations, which are highly
attractive, both in a global context and as regards local rural areas,
according to a complementarity between poverty and wealth functional to
the metropolitan regime but at risk of a social rather than health
short circuit, and on the other hand, a widespread and aggressive
anthropization of natural spaces both in terms of settlement
speculation and above all of productive exploitation (between
agriculture and animal breeding) capable of altering environmental and
socio-cultural balances, with strong repercussions also on the problem
of uncontrolled urbanization, thus initiating a perverse circular
system of cause and effect. With respect to these phenomena, with
strongly dystopian implications, the spatial structure, the constructed
forms and the functional regimes of the city and the surrounding
district should return to the centre of scientific focus according to a
planning perspective which is planetary but open to the many different
local contexts.
On the other hand, we must be aware that the pandemic emergency has
obliged the world to force situations traditionally resistant to
change, to create new ones, to break down a whole series of customary
structures. Thereby experimenting with new forms, at least in different
contexts starting from the workplace, especially through the use of the
digital technologies characterizing ICT (Information and Communications
Technology). Thanks to technology, it is possible to work from home,
saving time otherwise spent traveling, to be allocated to leisure time,
sport, family, often to the benefit of the domestic economy. The
advantages for the environment in terms of polluting emissions, or in
terms of business and service productivity through smart working, which
seems to record significant results in certain sectors, are far from
negligible. This perspective is supported by a concept of simultaneity,
of co-presence, of "virtual ubiquity", so much so as to suggest a
"return" to those conditions of unity, of non-specialized totality,
typical of pre-modern societies. Conditions of life in which the times
and places of daily activities could be less separated, ordered, by
functional categories but rather by "priority values" in the
simultaneity of their experience. A scale of everyday life according to
an idea of "village", instead of neighbourhood, street or district,
which prevails over all the others, which sees the radical reduction of
the daily range of movement as an assumption of a new socio-habitation
paradigm as an alternative to the phenomena of dormitory neighbourhoods
in urban suburbs. Certainly limiting movement is ok, but how can this
be done without in any other way undermining the absurd rhetoric of
infinite freedom of movement? That which, if we think about it, has
made low cost tourism proliferate, and which in twenty years has cost
us the lethal aggression of cities like Venice, the air traffic of
millions of flights filled with trolleys and people and goods of every
kind and everywhere.
In this scenario, at the architectural scale emerges the need to
rethink living spaces, and once again include in these those "work
spaces" that modern culture had expelled from the home for at least a
century (the shop, the laboratory, the study have always been an
integral part of the home). It is hardly by chance that for some time
now all E-commerce strategies have been moving in this direction,
through the progressive use of devices, home deliveries (lockers,
delivering and pickup points, hubs, etc.) and where marketing is
oriented towards multi-tasking and multi-purpose strategies in which
urban public space is the place of hybridization of experience, between
shopping, leisure, leisure, services. A system of urban behaviours,
individual and collective, but not without contradictory and disturbing
implications, linked to the idea of a citizen who is first of all a
consumer and of a bio-politically understood amazonization of life
forms in which domestic space, in certain conditions, assumes the
alienating dimension of socializing which is only virtual and
regimented by technological devices. And where there is a redefinition
of the limen between categories semantically misunderstood as
necessary, urgent, indispensable, useful, superfluous, routine, all of
them drugged in their conceptual, content and operational scope by
neo-liberal models of consumer induction.
No less involved in this fantasy are the collective spaces in which to
live "collaboratively" the experience of the city in particular in
terms of housing and work, environmental sustainability (containment
and energy production, waste collection, water resource management,
etc., etc.) but also an urban morphology designed for a new sense of
community and revaluation of space-time in the present.
In any case, quite apart from the formulas that can be adopted, there
is no more justification for the uncontrolled growth of human
settlements in land areas. There is no more space for the so-called
"informal city". Certainly, the city, like society, of Information and
Communications Technology, could be the freest, the most adaptable, the
most efficient (and perhaps the richest) only if it were to renounce, a
priori, some degree of (presumed) unconditional freedom, which
neoliberal practices have conveyed towards uncontrollable critical
situations in different areas, including that of settlement
development.
But how can we redefine in terms of spatial proxemics an idea of a city
animated by community effects and at the same time capable of producing
protected but participating individualities? To exemplify, it is as if
the aggregative character that we find inherent in the bounded
horizontality of collective spaces of historical matrix, could be
subverted by architectural thickenings which see deep inhabitable
loggias surrounding (and protecting at the same time) the perimeters of
the built volumes, and the visual contact between people and families
which populate these transitional spaces were able to generate new
relational models (only by living during the day in the apartment in a
city do you have the opportunity to see, i.e.,, to know visually and
dialogue with the community overlooking the street, the courtyard, the
open space, and exchange opinions, advice, impressions, to listen to
the silence of the city on the one hand and, on the other, to
experience the new habits of the inhabitants). In this way new types
but also new figures of architecture and of the urban scene, new
landscape are prefigured.
In this dual yet unified vision of the problem, as it emerges from the
"coronavirus" phenomenon, it becomes necessary, however, to overcome
the clichés of architecture and the sustainable city, of
which
the mitigation of greenery, up to the paradox of its verticalisation is
emblematic, to identify in depth the possible themes on which to focus
real alternatives capable of influencing both the sets and the timing
of the problem, considering them as part of a single process, as
coherent as possible, of a holistic nature, of patient construction,
through a dialectic in which knowledge and design are the basis of
non-modelling logic project progress.
The objective of this invitation, starting from a number of
considerations aimed only at stimulating those to whom it is addressed,
is to realize a first corollary of propositional analysis that opens
and solicits the definition of a clear and unavoidable perspective of
the contribution of architectural and urban design that cannot be
postponed and which is as systematic and generalized as possible,
albeit in the declinations which the local conditions of the global
world can positively put in place.
What should we learn from this emergency situation and from what is
implied? What aspects of inadequacy has architecture and the city shown
in this situation? What themes and objectives should be identified and
what kind of project strategies should be developed according to short,
medium and long term perspectives?
Carlo Quintelli, Marco Maretto, Enrico Prandi, Carlo Gandolfi
ICAR 14 - UNIPR coordination