*How could that not be good?
https://strelkamag.com/en/article/18-lessons-from-quarantine-urbanism
To what world will we reemerge after the distress and devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic? Calling for a geopolitics based on a deliberate plan for the coordination of the planet, design theorist and The Terraforming Program Director Benjamin H. Bratton looks at the underlying causes of the current crisis and identifies important lessons to be learned from it.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to offer commentary on a quickly shifting situation based on what one assumes the outcome to be, because the most likely outcome is almost never what happens. Allow me then to timestamp my remarks according to known signposts. Today, Western countries are in various stages of lockdown, catastrophe, and contradiction, while China is tentatively opening up again after months of hardship. In the United States, where I am holed up, the government fumbles between incoherent phases of bluster and bet hedging. Friends who should know better are turning into the Jude Law character from Contagion. Spanning the globe, the Kübler-Ross stages of grief are the new national horoscope: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. To say that the USA is ten days behind Italy is not only an epidemiological analysis; it is a psychiatric diagnosis.
At this point, we are looking at months of extreme weirdness and grief and then things will return to a state that will feel more normal, but forever not the same normal. Right now, that is the optimistic scenario. Afterwards, many ways of doing things, ways of thinking, ways of getting things going and offering critiques, may just not come back. Some will be missed, others not even noticed. What are the important lessons to be learned before the normality that caused mayhem returns? ...
