Not all social activities migrated to the virtual space.
The meetings among neighbours no longer took place in the empty collective spaces like entrances, staircases, and aisles, but literally moved to the periphery of the dwelling.
Service balconies, unused flat roofs, small courtyards, and even the window thickness, that tiny border between outside and inside whose contribution to the commercial value of the building was previously deemed irrelevant, became suddenly precious. The iconography of the lock-down is crowded with people looking out, squatting in the restricted volume of the wall openings, singing together or applauding from balconies and roofs.
These peripheral places were exactly those that shrunk over time, because, in a functionalist view, they were just wasted space.
The wall thickness, for example, has been long considered something that had to be reduced to increase the inner space. However, the window stools and jambs, whose deepness, in pre-modern architecture, allowed for sitting and reading, suddenly regained their real role in establishing a connection between exterior and interior.
Similarly, the small balconies and flat roofs that hosted choirs, discussions, and even tennis matches between rooftops have been previously demoted to minor activities like laundry drying or temporary storage.
But these ancillary spaces, placed at the periphery of the building, became the places where people could enact citizenship and publicly interact, restoring the public space out of private fragments, activated in an unusual way by voices, gazes, or simple physical presence.
Thus, the horizontal public space made up of squares and streets that usually enables meet-ups through the movement and gathering of bodies across it, was momentarily replaced by a vertical public space made up of a sequence of separated niches inhabited by still bodies that allowed a form of meeting based on the crossing of looks and sounds.
This compressed and composite peripheral public space was, however, paramount in maintaining the most important requirements of urban physical space: the unexpected encounter, the serendipity, the sudden connection, through the oblique gazes between balconies and windows and terraces, between people who usually belong to different groups.
Such a feature played an important role in balancing the other side of the public space during the lockdowns: the sociality of the network, based on homogeneity, obtained through the selection of individuals and ideas through algorithms (Ratti 2020).
The health emergency brought to the fore the need to introduce, within the layout of the dwelling, exterior spaces that can at once retain a private or semi-private nature and allow for a controlled exposition to the outside. As evidenced by the increasing price of semi-detached houses in central locations (Cheshire et al. 2021), the exterior spaces became unexpectedly the most valued value during lock-downs. Thus, balconies and gardens are not just ancillary spaces or added benefits to increase the value of the house. Their absence in affordable housing cannot be replaced by public parks or collective facilities. Their function is twofold. On the one hand, they bring natural lighting and ventilation to the enclosed rooms; on the other hand, they become part of a process of extroversion of the house that becomes a hub in the manifold relationship between the residents and the world outside. One of the best examples of a retrofit that addresses this kind of issue was designed well before the coronavirus outbreak.
From this perspective, the project for the conversion of 530 housing units in the Grand Parc in Bordeaux (2017),Footnote 8 designed by the French architects Lacaton and Vassal, appears to be an interesting reference.
The first aspect to notice is that Lacaton and Vassal worked on the building refurbishment of a social housing complex, showing a way to work on existing buildings and, in particular, to improve the living conditions of low-income households, which suffer from emergency situations—like lock-downs—the most.
The architects extended the domestic space by adding a further liminal space to the façade of the mass-built buildings. These winter gardens and balconies become a hinge between inside and outside and offer at the same time some extra space and proper light and ventilation.
This addition does not affect the main structure since its structure lies side by side with the existing one, thus allowing people to stay in their homes during the building phase (Fig. 5).
The lock-down happened at the end of a time when the demand and supply of housing have found their convergence in the construction of smaller and smaller dwellings (Wilson and Boehland 2005).
But the small house, easy to buy and maintain, was immediately perceived as overcrowded during the lockdown.
The progressive reduction of the size of the house is to be found for different reasons, some of which have been questioned precisely in this period of crisis.
Certainly, the first reason is economic: buying and managing a small house is less expensive than a larger one. From 2001 to 2011, rents increased by 87% and expenses for households by up to 133%, for an overall increase in the cost of housing of 84% (Eurostat 2022). In other words, the housing conditions of the weakest groups in qualitative terms are as if they were also directly proportional to the ability to secure a large house.
A second reason is the growing importance of the “sharing economy” and its influence on the sphere of residence. The use of “hit-and-run” cities, which materialise in the form of short and medium-term hospitality, has encouraged the choice of buying a smaller house, or subdividing the larger ones built up in the “economic boom” period. The concept of “small” has therefore taken on a positive meaning. Small houses have become more attractive because their size makes it possible to use them more easily and at a more accessible cost for temporary tenants.
In Europe, the most serious housing deprivation is found in Italy, where the size of housing is clearly limited (Capolongo et al. 2020) and the overcrowding rate is 27.1% against 15.7% of the European average (Eurostat 2020).
The long time spent while constrained in small rooms emphasised the reduced size of most European dwellings (Eurostat 2020), resulting in a feeling of discomfort that turned once pleasant refuges into oppressive places.
The putting-on-display of domestic space through social media throughout the lock-down brought to the fore the deep inequality in the quantity and quality of private space available to each person, adding a new dimension to the representative function of dwellings.
Just like in the nineteenth century, the characters in Guy de Maupassant’s novels took to the streets and recognised by their clothing the people who would give them a chance to socialise. The domestic interiors—or their being disguised behind stock backgrounds—showed the interlocutor’s status.
Furthermore, many of the positive takes on quarantine as an opportunity to read, watch movies, and practise new skills also describe living situations featuring plenty of space. “Romanticizing the quarantine is a class privilege” is a slogan that appeared on a banner hanging from a balcony in Spain and was shared via Twitter (Ayala del Río 2020), pointing out how the quarantine exacerbated class differences, bringing confrontation between social groups from the public space to the interior of the house. When the size and equipment of the home become essential for survival again, they symbolise the social condition of its inhabitants again.
While many people during isolation sought to reorganise the limited space of their dwelling to turn it into a safe, but tight-fitting bubble, those with more means tried to pursue safety just by stretching the distance between themselves and the others. In proportion to their wealth, they looked for isolated houses in the woods, deserted islands, or underground bunkers, equipped with food supplies and whatever they needed to survive catastrophes and natural disasters.
Unsurprisingly, several expensive housing prototypes were sponsored during the pandemic. One above all, the Klein Cabin, designed by Bjarke Ingels (2019)Footnote 9 for affluent city-dwellers who can choose where and how they want to live. Moving into the countryside, escaping to bunkers, flying to islands on private jets (Neate 2020) raises another important question. Although the house may be disconnected from the city in times of pandemic, its location, in crowded cities or isolated in remote places, strongly contributes to the perception of its safety. Consequently, when the public space dried up and all social activities moved through the digital networks inside the household, the latter can move to remote places where physical contact with others can be more easily reduced.
Theories that question the advantages of the city have a long tradition, from Howard (1898) to the present day.
During the earlier pandemic outbreak, the densely populated city core was perceived as a hotbed of infection.
Only apparently, lower population density equals higher protection against contagion.
In fact, later investigations showed lower mortality rates in more densely populated parts of the territory and higher rates in populated areas with lower densities (Hamidi et al. 2020). The reason is the more effective medical assistance in denser urban environments, but also because connectivity, not density, is relevant for the propagation of the virus.
In other words, less densely populated areas like hamlets and villages, with a higher degree of connectivity between the residents and with other settlements, have been hit more severely than denser city cores by the second wave of outbreaks.
Thus, the virus does not affect a particular urban form but any type of life based on exchange and connection.
There is therefore no reason to think that the pandemic alone can weaken the nature of urban centers.