The ‘Archipelago’ as Model for the Post-Pandemic City (Translated from Chinese)

(Translated from Chinese)

Adorno once said that we must learn ‘how not to be at home in one’s home’.

This captures our current feelings of intense unease living in a global pandemic. As medical professionals, public health officials, economists, planners, politicians, and inevitably architects scramble to understand how the pandemic will affect our lives and impact our cities, the consensus seems to be that these are unprecedented times. This, after all, is the first pandemic in a globalised world.

Spatially and behaviourally, the lockdown that followed the onset of the pandemic appears to have transformed the dichotomy between the home and the city.

The Smithsons used the phrase ‘art of inhabitation’ to describe how people adapt themselves and their environment. Enabled by communication and logistic technologies, the interior realm of the dwelling previously reserved for the most intimate moments of our lives have been sequestered, becoming meeting rooms, yoga studios, nurseries, stages, as well as recreational and productive nature. It would appear that, as if overnight, our public lives are being lived in the most private of settings. For a long while, we had all become what the Japanese called Hikikomoris - housebound individuals withdrawn from the outside world.

However, and perhaps paradoxically, our withdrawal into the interior has only served to accentuate the value of outdoor spaces within the city. From parks, gardens, squares, to roof tops, and even the pavement, these are now much sought-after places of respite, recreation and rebellion.

Between the domestic interior and the great outdoor, the rest of the city beyond our homes has also been fundamentally transformed. Theatres, museums, libraries, clubs, gyms, shopping malls, and offices were all forced to close. Public transit were curtailed and reduced. As the world walks the fine line between new waves of infection, mass vaccinations, and the easing of lockdown measures, many places of entertainment, worship, retail, and work have remained closed, leaving vast tracts of our city centres vacant.
Given the above, one might be inclined to think that the contraction of city life constitute an unprecedented phenomenon that require unprecedented solutions.

In this chapter, I will argue that the symptoms of the current crisis and its possible remedies can be better understood through a re-reading of The City in the City - Berlin: A Green Archipelago3 (hereinafter referred to as The City in the City), written in 19774 by O. M. Ungers, Rem Koolhaas, Hans Kollhoff, Arthur Ovaska, and Peter Riemann. Completed over four decades ago as a site specific manifesto in response to the post-war ‘thinning’ of Berlin, I argue that the text by Ungers et al. is now more pertinent than ever, offering us a radical and critical perspective through which we can begin to address the urban consequences of the pandemic we are presently experiencing.