Hodos: The Streets and Methods of (Post-)Pandemic Cities

Abstract

As a contribution to a book that seeks to explore experiences of life and its forms in the contemporary city, I will attempt to map out some of the aspects and elements, movements, and strategies, that we deploy to live, act and inter-act in our urban environments, specifically now that our social fabric has been so thoroughly uprooted by the COVID pandemic and its demands for our immediate response. In order to sketch some insights into this constantly changing disorderly order, taking into account the instability confronting the structural recur- rences or permanents, in this chapter, I want to address the temporary redesign of the public spaces of the (post-)pandemic city. My analysis explores how this outlines the conditions for distance and presence, mobility, and connection. Specifically, I will propose a set of conceptual coordinates to think about, or think with, these current urban interventions from a creative-humanities perspective. This proposal brings together a reflection on what we see happening on the streets of our cities with a methodological reflection on the intersections of urban, creative, and theoretical practices.