Lehrveranstaltung ZIFG Lehrveranstaltung EN (Seminar)

The current pandemic of COVID-19 has given a new sense of urgency to the century old discourse about disease and the built environment. In this seminar we will first critically examine how real and imagined threats of illness have shaped urban planning and policy. Historically, this resulted in a series of separations, boundaries and dichotomies, which are inscribed in social space: the boundaries between healthy and sick bodies, between pure and polluted spaces, between safe and dangerous practices. However, in the face of an increasingly interconnected world, crisscrossed through flows of people and other species, of goods, raw materials, and mutating viruses, these simple dichotomies need to be questioned. To understand the complex role of space in the current pandemic we need to reflect on modes of urbanization, on the urban metabolism as well as the conditions of vulnerability and precarity that unequally affect us.