In today’s post-digital age, our economy and society are extremely unstable and small disturbances can lead to serious problems that ultimately endanger the entire system. The coronavirus – defined as a disturbance – is currently showing us how quickly a local epidemic can turn into a pandemic that threatens the future of both the economy and society, and thus our ability to live together. What comes next, and when will it happen? Perhaps a new perspective of the city and the countryside will emerge.
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Our society today is characterised by the fact that it is highly differentiated and specialised at all levels, i.e. the economy, infrastructure, our way of life and leisure. At the same time, a great many activities are broken down into their individual parts, which are often scattered around the globe. These parts have to be held together day after day by a huge movement of goods and people and a vast exchange of data and information. The very high efficiency of this system, which leads to low costs for both producers and consumers but puts a great burden on the environment and the general public, is inextricably linked to fundamental instability. This instability is especially evident in four main areas:
1.) The extreme spatial divisions of labour, combined with just-in-time production (no warehousing), mean that a problem occurring anywhere in the world that disrupts production, traffic and/or the flow of data immediately affects the entire global economy as well as personal leisure time behaviour – problems in a remote region can easily have a global impact.
2.) Our lives and economy are completely dependent on electricity due to technological development and digitalisation – without electricity there is no transfer of information, no jobs and no transport. Small disturbances in the power supply or targeted hacker attacks can quickly paralyse our lives.
3.) In order to increase the efficiency of economic activity and the use of infrastructure, and to minimise costs, numerous reserves (capacity reserves in hospitals and factories, and personnel reserves for emergencies and breakdowns of all kinds) have been done away with in the last 20 years in accordance with neoliberal thinking. As a result, the economy and society are very poorly prepared for any exceptional situations.
4.) The financial sector lives entirely from positive expectations for the future, because the repayment of existing loans depends on the continuation of future economic activity in a positive direction. If this is called into question, however, the loans very quickly become “bad loans” and the financial collapse that accompanies this can easily affect the entire economy.
Small disturbances in any of these areas can quickly lead to serious problems, which in the end can even endanger the entire system. Triggers can be natural disasters, accidents, wars, terrorist attacks, social conflicts, environmental problems, economic crises or pandemics. With the coronavirus, we are currently seeing how quickly a local epidemic can turn into a pandemic that threatens the future of our economy and society.
“It will become necessary to review and modify the four factors of instability.”
It is not yet possible to predict how long this will last. However, everything indicates that it will continue to preoccupy us beyond 2020 and that living together as before corona will not be possible for some time to come. In the long term, this crisis may lead to central elements of our current economic activity and life – extreme specialisations, global divisions of labour, great distances between home and work, mobile recreation – being called into question. In such a situation, it would be reckless to concentrate solely on fighting the coronavirus and then to want to return to “life as usual”. Instead, it will become necessary to review and modify the four factors of instability mentioned above precisely because of their pronounced instability.
“We should rethink the relationship between urban and rural areas.”
What we should also rethink is the relationship between urban and rural areas: In light of the coronavirus, the “progressiveness” of cities, which are very highly specialised and globally networked, is being called into question to some extent, while at the same time the countryside’s previous “backwardness” suddenly appears to be quite positive in a new way. And a rural area that does not function as an extension of the city, but is decentralised and characterised by strong regional economic structures, could become an important factor of stability for cities in times of crisis.
“Perhaps the corona crisis will help put an end to the current lack of appreciation of rural life.”
However, this reassessment of urban and rural must not be allowed to lead to a situation in which the countryside is only seen as positive and cities only as negative – such complete shifts from one extreme to the other have occurred time and again in the past, especially during times of crisis. They do no justice to the reality of the city and the countryside as two different but equally valuable forms of life that complement each other, however. Perhaps the corona crisis will help put an end to the current lack of appreciation of rural life and to ensure that our society also develops a new urban-rural relationship in the search for more stable forms of life.
This opinion piece can be found in topos 111. Get your own copy here.
Rome – the eternal city. To architect Chiara Dorbolò the Italian capital is anything but eternal. On the contrary, its unique character is the result of a sometimes violent juxtaposition of different and transient identities: The authoritarian and the rebellious, the formal and the spontaneous, the new and the old, the devoted and the careless. In times of the coronavirus a new identity has arisen and another vanished: The empty and the overcrowded. In a way, the absence of urban life brings Rome back to its promised eternity.
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Last weeks’ footage of Rome has a confounding familiarity to it. Its streets emptied by the government response to the pandemic, the eternal city seems to have finally honoured its reputation, suspended in a timeless state devoid of human life. Yet, the photos of the Spanish Steps, one of the city’s most famous tourist attractions, only depict the final stage of a process already started in 2016, when the monumental stairway was cleaned as part of a costly Bulgari-funded operation. After the marble was returned to its original white, some suggested fencing off the area off and locking it overnight to avoid a quick return to old habits and dirt. The proposal was rejected, but then in June 2019 the municipality issued a ban on sitting, eating, or drinking on the Spanish Steps and other monumental stairways. While policemen monitored the steps, whistling at incredulous tourists, Roman intellectuals were divided between those in favour of protecting the monuments and those who considered the ban an overly authoritarian measure. This coming summer the debate will not arise again.
“The city centre has become an open-air museum, where speculation has gradually forced out local residents and activities.”
Until last year Rome was the main tourist destination in a country that relies heavily on tourism for its gross domestic product. In the effort to monetise its historical heritage, the city has faced the same difficulties as other European tourist hotspots such as Barcelona, Amsterdam, and London. The city centre has become an open-air museum, where speculation has gradually forced out local residents and activities. A common example is Campo de’ Fiori, the famous square where the 17th-century philosopher Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake as a heretic. The only important square in Rome without a church, it was historically associated with the tension between Catholicism and secularism. It was a meeting place for hippies in the ‘60s and feminists in the ‘70s, and later it became very popular among foreign students and professionals (mostly American) in Rome. A couple of decades ago, despite the already numerous tourists, and the chaos often wrought by football fans on weekend nights, the area was still home to a lot of permanent residents. Every morning, they would stroll the market stalls set up at dawn by farmers coming from the city’s outskirts. Now the market is still there, but no one is doing their grocery shopping there. Produce has been mostly replaced by souvenirs, fruit salads to go, and local delicacies. The clochards, artists and activists who used to populate the square have given way to weekend travellers and tourism workers; shops have turned into restaurants and bars, and apartments into short-stay accommodations.
“Have Romans given up on their city centre?”
As the tourist area expands, a similar process is affecting other, not so central neighbourhoods as well. In Monti and Pigneto, for example, local movements are now recognising and strongly opposing gentrification. A notable example is the Ex SNIA, an artificial lake born from a real estate mishap and then reclaimed by the neighbourhood as a public asset. And yet, cases of angered residents fighting speculation in central areas are quite rare. For the most part, opposition to gentrification in the city centre stems from intellectuals who strive to save specific cultural sites rather than social movements opposing a broad urban phenomenon. In a city where the boundary between the centre and the periphery is far from being clear-cut, newer neighbourhoods’ social fabric seems to reflect a stronger identification with the urban context. Have Romans given up on their city centre? Probably not.
“Allowing the city to coexist with tourism without losing herself in it.”
We just believe the identity of the city to be immortal. With our special kind of cynicism, we dismiss every change as temporary and insignificant, in the face of what the city has experienced in its almost 3000 years of life. But the eternal city is not eternal. On the contrary, its unique character is the result of the sometimes violent juxtaposition of different and transient identities: The authoritarian and the rebellious, the formal and the spontaneous, the new and the old, the devoted and the careless. This complexity, rather than the white marble of the Spanish Steps, is what needs to be protected − and not from an invasion by ill-behaved tourists but from the speculative, extractive and toxic relationship that tied them to the city. Perhaps the relaunch of the tourist sector that will inevitably follow the end of this pandemic can be used to set the course straight, allowing the city to coexist with tourism without losing herself in it.
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Chiara Dorbolò is an independent architect and researcher. She studied in Rome and in Amsterdam and currently works as a contributing editor to Failed Architecture. She teaches architectural theory and practice at the Academy of Architecture in Amsterdam.
Read this Metropolis Explained and other articles in topos 111.
