Recovering the Right to the City in Post Pandemic-What about sacred spaces?

Architecture and urban design represent one of the most complex scenarios when it comes to imaging the new city that could flourish after the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the biggest challenges stands in how to properly synthetize the huge variety of scientific, cultural, political, and social outlooks, that actually characterized the last decades of anthropocentric condition. If cities will be still the centre of our lives and dwelling, concepts such as fast urbanization and uncontrolled growth should leave space to new ideas and strategies that can nurture more systemic and sustainable visions for the future of urban environments. “What will come” is not merely a new question for human society, but one of the most compelling to address right now. Future urban and design studies usually try to understand what is likely to continue and what might plausibly change. Forecasting is still the main trend within this field, where predicting the future is based on current trend analysis in a typical ‘presentto-future’ direction. But for architecture and urban design, and for their complexity, the latter might not be enough. John R. Robinson, in the 90s, proposed to operate ‘backward’ and to backcast instead of forecast. Backcasting, works on imagining a possible/desired future and then work backwards to identify policy and procedures that might connected that specific vision to our present. More than the future itself, this attitude focuses on the construction of a progressive knowledge and set of skills that can move from a future end point back to us, and relates more to the actions for reaching a certain goal than to the goal itself. With this mind, in this session we invite discourses that can reflect on the variety and diversity of backcasting studies and analysis, and how this relates to no-intervention trends. The different perspectives can contribute to defining a catalogue of methods and strategies to imagine “what the post-pandemic city” could or will be and to formulate “desirable future environments” for the human society.