Urban Habitats Post Covid
How will we live together? This is the theme of the 2021 Architecture Biennale taking place Venice right now until the 21st of November, curated this year by Lebanese architect, professor and Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT Hashim Sarkis. The Biennale includes works by 112 participants from 46 countries with a strong representation from Africa, Latin America and Asia. It is divided into five thematic areas: Among Diverse Beings, As New Households, As Emerging Communities, Across Borders and As One Planet.
There is a strong desire for architecture and, above all, we wonder how architecture can respond to the new challenges that climate change urgently poses to us, the role that public spaces can play in the urban revolution due to the pandemic and the new reconstruction techniques.
To use the metaphor of the symptom of this virus that COVID19 really “took our breath away”, the pandemic forced us to reshape the consolidated familiar dynamics which marked our daily lives. The lockdown and social distancing measures created a spatial temporal distortion and forced us to change the way we inhabit the city.
The most important distortion was precisely the changing of perception of the urban space, which has been progressively reduced. Having the freedom to go out just to shop, take a walk and look for some greenery within 200-300 metres from home made us discover the urban space that surrounds our homes. We have rediscovered the beauty of living in a neighbourhood.
In the last century, we saw the frenzy of concentration in urban centres contaminating large swathes of populations. They were pursuing the utopia of a better life, living in cities increasingly full of services, infrastructure, work and opportunities. Yet, according to UN Habitat’s World City Report 2020, the pandemic was first and foremost an urban phenomenon: more than 90% of cases confirmed were concentrated in big cities like Wuhan, Milan, Madrid, New York City and Mumbai.
During the pandemic, the new need for social distancing brought back to life the quality of a slower and more sustainable lifestyle which are linked to the rhythms of nature and restoring attractiveness to the smaller historic centres with low population density.
The challenge of improving the quality of life in our cities is certainly not based on a nostalgic return to the past: we actually need to reactivate the balance between man and nature. We need to learn from the crisis and activate sustainable urban systems that are capable of amplifying community life without consuming natural, energy and environmental resources.
The historic districts of many Mediterranean cities have survived thanks to the strong osmosis between workplaces, agricultural areas, public socialization space and private housing. The contemporary urban layout with the list of separate functions has not worked. Only by applying an ecological approach can we trigger a true and therapeutic regeneration process for the city and its inhabitants.
The real post-COVID19 challenge has to focus on the actual level of sustainability we will achieve in our cities, restoring the balance between urban areas and agricultural territories, increasing the green areas for a better air quality designed towards reduced environmental impact via ecological footprint, pollution, GHG emissions, using recycled or recycling materials and with production logics based on the green and circular economy.