HEALTHY CITY & CORONA

  • 20.09.2019
  • ANCB - Aedes Network Campus, Berlin
  • Public debate, moderation Gemma Koppen and Tanja C. Vollmer (Language: English)
  • The AEDES Metropolitan Laboratory and UN Studio, The Netherlands
  • ANCB

Half a year before the outbreak of the corona virus in Germany, we discuss what at the time of this web entry, on 02.04.2020, seems hardly imaginable: crowded cities, rush instead of rest, suffocated streets. While worldwide urban life is coming to a standstill and for the first time climate targets are being achieved by stopping air traffic and banning travel, the exciting question for us remains whether such a change is only possible by threatening our own lives. As we lead through the event ‘Towards a Healthy City’ in September 2019, this motivator is not an issue. On the contrary, scientists from the Netherlands, Great Britain and Germany show the ‘green side’ of the city as healing successes. However, it is precisely this pandemic that shows us that we have neglected an important aspect in the attempt to heal through architecture, which kopvol has been pointing out for years: suffering is a spatial designer with a professional ban (from: ‘Die Erkrankung des Raumes’. Vollmer and Koppen, 2010).