Postpandemic Urban Habitat in the Age of Contamination

Abstract

The challenge for post-pandemic urban habitats will be to recover their natural polycentrism, the diversity of their neighborhoods which, ceasing to be fragile suburbs, return to being places of lives and not just of homes, bridging the educational, working, cultural, digital divides, acquiring micro-places of public health and self-sufficient energy communities. I imagine cities of a renewed urban proxemic made up of "augmented urban communities" (according to the principles I described earlier) that reduce their frantic centripetal mobility and that facilitate a more measured mobility guaranteeing the answer to many needs within 15 minutes from home (the “15-minute city”, as already launched by Paris and Milan and being tested in Palermo). It will therefore be necessary to extend the domestic space by expanding those intermediate spaces that can allow a life of safe relationships: widening the sidewalks and providing temporary pedestrianisation to expand the playgrounds for children and adult activity, create new tactical urban planning interventions for the placement of seats also for bars and restaurants that will have to guarantee the distancing. Bring the theaters and cinemas to the public space, reuse abandoned buildings to accommodate shared functions. A sort of pneumatic osmotic band that enriches the domestic life and could become a city project, filling these neighbourhoods with vegetable gardens, productive activities and spaces for a safe and distributed relational life.