Biopolitics and fear

After one year of domestic lockdown, a large part of the world’s population is facing 2021 as a period of waiting that prefigures a future based on pharmaceutical technology and Biopolitics, a term that is dramatically in the limelight today. Michel Foucault used this word as early as the 1970s to describe biology as a central category of contemporary politics. The aim is to protect, improve and develop human life by regulating the processes of reproduction, sanitation and prophylaxis, while at the same time seeking to increase economic and social development. Architecture, in all its forms and at scales, has always been part of these processes. Indeed, in many ways, the adventure of the pioneers of the Modern Movement started from these basic hygienic needs, which were fundamental for a society that was transforming from rural to urban, and finally becoming the metropolitan civilisation of the second half of the last century.