RE-EVALUATING THE DISTANCE: VIRUS AS A “GREAT URBAN PLANNER” IN THE REDISCOVERY OF INNER AREAS AT RISK OF DEPOPULATION

The Covid-19 pandemic has triggered a broad critical reflection on the improvement of human life with respect to the themes of living and the relationship with nature and the environment, marking a return to those inner areas from which in the last century we had moved away because they were considered isolated, cut off from the urban logic of connections, of proximity (Fig. 1).
Now that distance appears necessary, perhaps our parameters and desires have also changed. The lockdown has awakened us dormant desires of nature, of culinary tradition, of a different relationship with the neighborhood; in short, it has changed our horizon.
Here the virus, “great urban planner” – paraphrasing the book of Marguerite Yourcenar “the time great sculptor ” -, acts as an accelerator of transformations in attributing a new centrality to those smaller towns up to that moment considered at risk of abandonment, bringing out that cultural and historical-landscape richness that has always existed but prefiguring new or rediscovered models of reuse of the territory in favor of a possible demographic recovery that is more residential than receptive and that passes for a new model of life. Smart working and digital teaching open up to new perspectives by reducing the disadvantages due to the distance from essential services and prefiguring a new dimension of living that can influence individual choices in the direction of building a new way of living.
Designing a new time of work reconciling it with a different cycle of life is what we could therefore try to do to fulfill a long-lost request for a relationship with nature. The question is complex and not without problems, but the regeneration of inner areas at risk of depopulation passes from this opportunity which must not be lost.