Where will you live?
March 2030, ten years after the pandemic. I live in Italy, but Italy has changed. Because the world has changed: the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals from their 2030 Agenda have been fully achieved, and the word ‘environment’ has become a paradigm able to keep together all the societies in the world, now able to preserve their original characteristics and at the same time share feelings and values common to the whole human kind.
By the irony of fate, the shift happened in 2020, when a global pandemic catapulted us into a future we hadn’t been able to build before. It was our response to Covid-19 that changed history. The changes in lifestyles that occurred at the end of the crisis radically transformed the way we worked, studied, received medical assistance, lived, shopped and consumed culture.

The pandemic drove governments to massively invest in information technology infrastructures, and in a few years the internet reached those areas of the planet previously weakly connected or not at all. This allowed individuals to assume greater control of their choices: we can choose where to live and where to work; we consume fewer resources, we buy less, but in a more informed way. The tendency to concentrate in big cities took a U-turn. Life after the Coronavirus has been characterised by new suburbanisation models, the idea of ‘social distancing’ might in fact have inspired an ‘urban distancing’. Life in small cities became more attractive when the goods and cultural offer once only available in big cities were made readily available on line or with same-day delivery. This way, live shows and cultural events have spread throughout the territory, multiplying and diversifying.

The closing down of all activities and the working from home, compulsory for the duration of the pandemic, made us discover a new dimension of inhabiting. Our homes were therefore redesigned and adapted to a different life: not conceived as mere sleeping quarters to return to at the end of a hard working day anymore, our homes now have spaces equipped for remote working, but we can also take a stroll to a work space shared among neighbours, where everybody connects with their own work place. The pandemic showed the importance of balconies, terraces, private and public courtyards and gardens. The green approach to urban development has dotted the spaces with plants put in place to refresh and purify the air.
Since the fear of contagion has made us reluctant to use urban public transports, we have rethought spaces in a way to facilitate autonomous travel, if possible on foot, reducing the need to travel between distant parts of the city and work commuting.

In Paris, they had already started reflecting on an alternative model than the 20th century metropolis before the pandemic. They had called it Ville du quart d’heure (the quarter-of-an-hour city). To reduce pollution, and also to allow for social distancing between people and to avoid crowding on Metro carriages, Paris strived so that all its citizens could reach all they needed in a quarter of an hour on foot or by bike: work places, schools, shops, supermarkets, parks, gyms and sports centres. The quarter-of-an-hour city reduces distances to a minimum therefore encouraging means of travelling requiring physical activity.
Before 2020, cities occupied only 2% of the Earth’s surface, but used three quarters of the resources, producing greenhouse gas clouds, billions of tonnes of solid waste and a huge volume of toxic emissions. Their inhabitants inconsiderably exploited land and water resources to produce food, and forests to obtain wood and paper.

Today, it’s not like that anymore. No more smell of fumes from exhausts or rubbish abandoned in the streets. Cars use hydrogen engines and produce a hundredth of the pollution they used to. Rubbish collection issues, a nightmare for mayors before the pandemic, have also been solved: automated systems of pneumatic collection start from public and communal bins, pushing the rubbish with air pressure along the ducts into a collection area, where almost everything gets recycled and reincorporated into the consumption process.
The aesthetic aspect of the cities has changed too. The beauty of the Italian cities left deserted and silent during the lockdown touched the heart of the administrators, who devised a majestic plan to free streets and squares from parked cars and incessant traffic. The relocalisation of work places and services had already reduced circulation and the need for parking spaces, what few cars are left are accommodated in big underground parking lots hiding them from sight. More green, less noise, almost no accidents, better air. And many people have moved to minor Italian centres revitalising them, excellent places for quality of life, not neglected by government services anymore.