Sick City

Abstract

At the risk of becoming exaggeratedly epochal, this first issue of the third stage of Astrágalo cannot avoid focusing on the impact that the still ongoing Covid pandemic has inflicted on many of our cities and even on the very concept of the city as a cauldron or melting-pot of many people together who managed to confer on these devices their modern values of social culture. Since the beginning of the 2020s, cities, to a greater or lesser extent, have become diseased and unhealthy organisms for their inhabitants by the mere circumstance of living in common with a relatively high density of habitability. The metro and public transport in general, the elevators of the great towers or the small signature cafés that delighted metropolitan inhabitants as much as the modern practices of the urban flanerie, have turned from being evidence of the irresistible process of metropolisation of the world, into quasi traps where the novel virus lurks, which also manages to transmute its DNA into different variants and perhaps to indicate that it is one more in a possibly long series of zoonotic mutations that will occur in the future.
The virosic crowning of the 2020-21 world holds philosophical, political and vital concerns and summons or demands rethinking the already devalued theoretical-disciplinary arsenal of architecture as much as the battered field of urban planning knowledge. The incipient responses of new panoptic forms, of bordered and introspective micro-cities in their limits, of geometric arrangements of distances between people are, on the whole, pathetic ways of presenting the design imaginary in the face of new challenges. If architecture already practised a notorious conceptual dumbness in the face of the commercial-technical subjugation of urban life, the current circumstances of the near future aggravate such stupor and uncertainty.