Augmented Cities in Post-pandemic Age

Abstract

The effects of the Anthropocene are mainly urban, because the cities with their expansion have devoured the natural soil, the identity structures of the cultural palimpsests and the vegetable plots of the cities, invading delicate natural ecosystems, awakening and expanding diseases previously confined and separated in the wild environments. How to get out of the planetary environmental crisis, which is above all an urban habitats’ crisis? The answer, therefore, can only be urban, acting on a rethinking of cities as places of living in balance with other living species, in homeostasis with the planet. Especially in Europe, we must update the idea of cities as privileged places of public health, as was the case at the birth of modern urban planning fueled by the health matrix: let's think of the plans of Barcelona (1859) and London (1944) designed precisely to counteract the epidemics and that have given a powerful boost to urban innovation because they have been able to face the city according to a new general vision, implemented through concrete spatial practices. The time has come to adopt a new ecological paradigm in the design of urban habitats, putting in place a new circular urban planning, capable of designing and regenerating cities, territories and landscapes by reactivating their natural metabolisms, working on waste, planning recycling and contrasting the planned obsolescence of the cities of the predatory Anthropocene. The challenge is not only within the city, but the new development paradigm will have to reactivate the fertile alliance between urban and rural dimension, guiding appropriate cooperation strategies. Furthermore, we must be able to rethink the settlement patterns by eliminating the concept of suburbs as a scrap produced by the ravenous urban expansion and the related concentration of real estate and financial values in centers that become increasingly hyper-centers. We must therefore stimulate the creativity of resilient habitats that are already producing new and courageous innovative practices in various parts of Europe.