No one would have thought to start a 2020 in this way, with a virus, the COVID-19, unknown for the most, which suddenly changed ours lives. From one day to the next we had to change the organization of our lives, habits, social relations, work, spaces, but nobody thought to ask to an architect. The architect is the one who, by definition, organizes the spaces and then who better than him could perform this task?
Many of my colleagues in this period have tried to give their contribution, and my humble opinion is that things will not change. On the contrary, you just need to remember the Spanish flu and how most people behaved at the end of the epidemic. Between 1918 and 1920 the “Spanish” killed tens of millions of people and at the end of the 1920s we found ourselves in the euphoria well told by the movie “the great Gatsby”.
Therefore, after this long period of imprisonment, a lot freedom will be granted to everyone. Many of us see the pandemic as an accelerator of changes. We will change our habits, we will work often from home, bosses will perhaps learn to make their employees work for target and not just evaluate them for the time they are sitting behind a desk, many of us have found it’s convenient to shop from home, since the euphoria of shopping does not involve us when we have to buy a detergent or some pasta. But what about our cities?
Urban planning as I have studied it has become too obsolete. Changes are too sudden and cities can’t be thrown away like an old phone. Cities will have to be adapted to new experiences and needs. We will not need crowded spaces and the frenzy of a shopping mall, but we will need spaces that increase people’s well-being, spaces conceived on a human scale, when by measure I am not referring to a geometric distance but to psycho-physical well-being. City edges will have to be rethought and recalibrated, we could not think of crowded suburbs isolated from the city centre. Public spaces will have to improve the quality of life and reduce social distances. Public spaces and people well-being will regulate the pace of life and consequently organise the mobility system. Cycle paths, pedestrian paths, buses, subways, sharing services, will have to be part of a single organic mobility project. Urban planning will have to reconcile all these aspects and play a coordinating role in the design of spaces and solids; it will have to use the smallest scales to represent the city and its individual parts: town halls, neighbourhoods, districts; only in this way will the architect have the tools to conceive new spaces, new limits, new relationships and improve the quality of our lives. Only one problem will remain: the times; because our policy is not ready to change so quickly, bureaucracy does not follow the time of technology and pandemics, someone should be in charge with it, but architects can’t do everything.