On “loss of nearness” in contemporary cities

Many thought that everything would have changed after the Covid-2019 pandemic, that restrictions on socialization would irreversibly affect lifestyles, and the relationship between the individual, the home and the city. Until a few months ago, the end of cities and flight to the countryside seemed an inevitable collective fate. Some features, put in place and reinforced during the pandemic experience, have remained in current practice, consolidating previously tested aspects (online work, commerce, and digital platforms). The housing market has also experienced some large-scale trend changes, such as the increase in demand for housing with outdoor spaces (gardens, balconies, terraces, loggias, verandas, etc. ), along with the attempt to transform existing real estate, an exercise earlier masterfully carried out by Lacaton & Vassal in Plus, giving concrete and implementation success to conceptual and theoretical-experimental insights already expressed in the 1970s by John Habraken in Supports: an alternative to mass housing and by the Sites (an acronym for Sculpture in the Environment founded by James Wines), on the hypothesis of organizing a nomadic housing system similar to caravans (or the many Space Shuttle variants devised by architects and artists during the 1960s) to be “parked” in infrastructured structural skeletons and or vegetation incorporated into the buildings such as the prototype created for BEST Products’ Forest Showroom in Richmond, Virginia, 1980 (An existing forest was incorporated as an intrinsic part of the building).