Salutogenese – Das Jahrbuch der KIT-Fakultät für Architektur 2021

Recovering from Totality
Daniel Lythgoe
How a public health crisis is showing the need
to re-examine the ways in which we think about
urban development.
Every time and place presents its own challenges; the spectre
haunting ours is that of the Covid-19 pandemic. Now, in
central Europe it would appear we find ourselves in its waning
days. However, its ramifications — as so often happens
with a crisis of such magnitude — reach far beyond the
sphere of public health. They shed light on other deficiencies
of our social and political order, driving a wedge into the
fault lines along which they are arrayed.
Dense urban environments bear the brunt of this illuminating
mechanism. In an effort to stem the spread of the virus
through various lock-down measures, the shift towards
remote work and e-government has markedly accelerated,
even in Germany, whose reputation for being digitalscheu
(digitally shy) precedes it. ↘ 1 Similarly, the sprawling retail
landscapes that have come to epitomise the placeless, homogenised
high street face displacement by online retail,
which is better able to simulate the much-coveted frictionless
shopping experience. Operating between immaterial
labour and consumption, many of these land-use-patterns
have little basis in local community, emerging not from civil
society but from capital interests that view real-estate as
a repository for surplus value. And, as soon as the wheels
stop turning, the functional monocultures they produce
prove themselves to be particularly fragile.
To ask what a post-pandemic recovery of the city is to question
this status-quo. Yet if we are to do so, we must as a
consequence question the dispositif that produces it; that is,
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