Arts , Humanities & Social Science

Abstract

We are aware that the phenomenon we are currently experiencing as a result of the Coronavirus pandemic is producing radical implications in terms of environmental transformations, changes in the relationship between man and nature and social relationships. These major questions are leading us once again to think "big" and to formulate new theories, which inevitably involve all our spheres of knowledge. One of the topics that will continue to be linked to this long, exhausting struggle against Covid-19 is that of social distancing. This is the expression around which the phase or phases revolve, which have confined all, or nearly all of us within our own four walls. 

Social distancing is an expression, which has been discussed in depth, and various sociological, anthropological and psychological theories have been compared since the nineteen thirties. According to Vincenzo Cesareo  the concept of social distancing before Covid-19 was understood as "the relational closure of an individual towards others, who are perceived and recognized as different depending on the social categories to which they can be traced. It is the result of the dynamic interlacing of factors from different dimensions in space: physical, symbolic and geometric." A pandemic wipes out social and cultural categories and extends the principle of Physical geometric distancing to all of humanity without distinction. We are speaking of a space which expands in terms of linear meters and which, on the contrary, shrinks to within a telematic, virtual dimension. With Covid-19 we now know what it means to work, read. Communicate, take part in events, conferences, exhibitions, travel and carry out research within a single, infinite, fluid space. In terms of architecture and town planning, the virtual space corresponds to an annulment of the traditional, physical distances between living, work and recreation, which for Le Corbusier represented the functional and spatial categories established in the Athens Charter and which were part of the principles and rules to construct the future city. Similarly, virtual communication has seen the continual decrease in distance between public and private space, and the most appropriate place to contain different functions and spatial requirements is actually the home. First and foremost, we have been able to ascertain that the house has the potential to transform into a multi-functional space, a place where we live, work, carry out research, communicate with the world, into a place of recreation and entertainment, in a public, yet at the same time private area and, therefore, a total space, in which everything can be automated and where everything can be perfect: our bodies, objects and furnishings. Perhaps after the pandemic, our cities will consist of a group of total houses where cars will transform into perfect chauffeurs, in which materials, such as metamaterials  or 3D graphene  will be able to make us invisible or make us live in transparent structures made of very fine but, at the same time, extremely resistant membranes. Perhaps we will not need to design and construct public places, merely because they will be of no use, and perhaps cities of the future will only have underground department stores with long travellators and service lifts. The goods purchased will be sent directly to our homes via the lifts.