Barcelona Metropolis

COVID-19 has spread faster in dense urban areas, resulting in a higher mortality rate compared to rural areas. By drawing the diagram of the virus’s behaviour and its spread in cities, we realise that, besides a health crisis, what we are experiencing today is also a design crisis as regards the way we have planned and built our cities and homes.

The pandemic crisis that has turned the world upside down is much more than a health crisis. Overcrowded cities, the long-distance transport of people and goods, as well as a rise in patients with respiratory problems due to ambient or indoor pollution have been the underlying causes behind the exponential growth of the new virus. COVID-19 has travelled as fast as our consumer products move from one part of the world to another. And it has spread faster in dense cities, leading to a higher mortality rate compared to rural areas.

The high density of cities and the pursuit of the highest possible real estate profits, prioritised over the quality of the space, have also resulted in the existence of a large number of “sick” and overcrowded buildings. Households, homes and entire city blocks that lack adequate orientation, sun exposure and natural ventilation, trigger an additional effect to that of the virus: the deterioration of people’s mental and physical health on account of being confined and isolated in wholly interior and tiny homes. Nowadays, these types of buildings have become the norm in cities, which also seem designed to force their citizens (or products) to invest large amounts of time in reaching their destination, either by public or private transport. They are cities based on economies of scale whose production is often centralised in obsolete remote factories.

By drawing the diagram of the virus’s behaviour and its spread in cities, we realise that, besides a health crisis, what we are experiencing today is also a design crisis. The unforeseen health and social problems our world is confronted with today and the additional (possibly more serious) social and economic challenges that we will face during and after the recovery of health urge us to rethink and restructure many of the design traditions of buildings and of the city itself, as well as the foundations on which they have operated over recent decades. Rethinking design by combining it with multidisciplinary science to give precedence to citizens’ quality of life is a powerful way for architecture to innovate and, therefore, generate a change and a positive impact on the built environment and the society that inhabits it.

The commitment to natural and organic materials

Given the fact that our buildings today are the largest CO₂ emitters and energy consumers, and that the construction sector is the biggest generator of waste in the world, architecture is urged to redefine the metabolism of buildings and cities. By learning from materials science, architectural design can foster the creation of healthier indoor environments by avoiding plastic, lead and other toxic materials traditionally used in interior construction. New or renewed bio, natural and organic compounds (including soil, biomass, ceramics and certain types of wood) can improve indoor air quality and reduce respiratory illnesses while contributing to passive cooling and heating, thereby mitigating the need to increase hermetically-sealed interiors which, in turn, can lead to the concentration of dust mites.

Instead of highly engineered synthetic materials, we must insist on a new paradigm for building materials derived from natural resources or created by organic waste streams, which can be transformed into new resources to create engineering products for construction and architecture that contribute to a new value chain where waste or organic content are the chief resources. We should also pay more attention to local artisans or communities of manufacturers and makers who are contributing to the creation of a variety of formulae and DIY (“do it yourself”) techniques to produce new recycled or natural and bio-based compounds. Boosted by open-source culture and the Internet, individuals and local communities can customise these new libraries of materials to build their own havens of “circular” products.

Algorithms and collective intelligence, tools for planning

Finally, we can learn from data science and the social sciences. Architectural design and urban analysis can integrate statistical models and algorithms to predict phenomena, including epidemics or natural disasters, among others. The Internet of Things, sensor technologies and mobile applications have become essential tools during the pandemic crisis to monitor, predict and prevent virus outbreaks. And they can also prevent other crises, such as the climate crisis. In a fast-paced digital society, the data collected from billions of devices and our digital fingerprints are the most valuable fuel for running the engines of sustainable planning.

But there is more to learn if we observe and analyse the intelligence embedded in the disorganised decisions of users in our built environment. By overlaying quantified data with qualitative data related to people’s wishes, we can plan solutions based on citizens’ real needs for our future urban environment. Therefore, we need to invest in collective intelligence design models that go beyond cognitive or artificial intelligence. The combination of big data, artificial intelligence and crowd intelligence opens up unique opportunities for human-centred planning and co-creation, and drives real-time adaptive design that help both people and resilience strategies in the environment in which they live.