BUILDING A POST-COVID REALITY
It hardly needs stating that the first two decades of this century have led humanity into serial crises. Climate change, terrorism, economic meltdowns, growing nationalism, viral attacks and, finally, a pandemic. The rising cascade of catastrophes seems to be our selected path into the future. It is obvious that most such disasters are the result of failing political and economic policies, coupled with the lack of will and consensus between governments.
Just look at global ambitions related to climate change: as part of the Paris Agreement, governments grudgingly agreed to limit global temperature rise to less than two degrees; all this while cyclones, forest fires and famines will continue. Unwilling to give up ingrained food choices like dairy and beef—whose production contributes to global warming—some people may switch to cultured meat and artificial milk. As a concession to cut vehicular pollution, some will ride electric selfdriving cars; but the current system of highways will remain intact, even grow. Air travel will continue, but will be supplemented by hyperloops and maglev trains. Technological advances are merely used to offer more choices in conventional living and retain, as the Americans say, ‘our way of life’.
But things have suddenly changed. With the novel coronavirus spreading everywhere, the wide boundless arc of the good life is now compressed into a more focused domesticity. People are huddled at home, working from there, entertaining each other. The fear of contaminating and being contaminated keeps public life in check. What impact will this have in the long term?
Is this an end to bloated houses, big expensive cars, familiar fast foods, obesity and all the excesses of travel? How then do we imagine life in the city? Our current state of closeted well-being will need a future outlet as places forge an altogether new urban life—a life that adapts the gains of the lockdown into measurable routines. It falls on architects and planners to create a blueprint for the physical structure of the city and, if need be, define extreme and radical solutions. Invention comes at times of crises, and the current situation is the loudest call to break fresh ground.
Can design then ask important civic questions? In cities reeling with inequities and physical shortage of space, can a family of four learn to live in a quarter of the area occupied by the current middle-class home? Could its compaction also include other ideas of vertical vegetable gardens, solar kitchens and work space to make it an efficient comfort machine? Since work from home would be the new reality, movement in the city would be unnecessary. Could then battery-less mini solar cars operate locally and only in daylight, forcing people to complete their daily tasks before dark, in accordance with the sun’s rotation? With schools, colleges, restaurants, commerce and entertainment online, neighbourhood community centres could become crucial social connectors, also functioning as primary schools and health clinics? Moreover, in a world digitally connected, physical travel to distant places could be avoided, and entire lives constructed within the ambit of a shortened radius.
Doubtless, there is a tendency to project a utopian idealism when there is a dramatic shift of direction; but it goes without saying that societies everywhere will be profoundly shaped by the pandemic. Those that have the capacity to radically alter their future thinking will gain immensely from the changed circumstances. India, sadly, has been a timid follower of world trends and has rarely set a path of its own. The failed approaches of the most advanced of countries, which still remain mired to the belief of preserving ‘our way of life’, demands that we create models of our own. At a time when extraordinary shifts in physical space, city life and living patterns are being revealed to us, it seems the right time to forge an independent direction. Shorn of overconsumption, it will dictate the difference between surviving alone or living well together. A new urban future, however uncertain, is always preferable to one that returns to revive a dead cow. ■
Is this an end to bloated houses, big expensive cars, familiar fast foods, obesity and all the excesses of travel?