Soft City, Soft Haus: Agile Infrastructures for a Post-Pandemic Planet

“The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the fragility of existing models of housing, collective life, and infrastructure. The 99% have been disproportionately marginalized by shelter-in-place orders and quarantines which assume they have the resources to weather this moment of extreme instability. The transition from a quarantine to a post-pandemic city will not only be a fight for collective human health and wellbeing, but will also be the staging ground for our last stand to prevent a forthcoming climate catastrophe. New paradigms of urban design and civic infrastructure must be decoupled from society’s carbon-intensive practices and archaic fetishes for “solidity” in building, such as concrete and glass architectures with limited lifespans. At the scale of the polis, Soft City, Soft Haus calls for the design and deployment of inflatable architectures within the surplus spaces of carbon-formed cities (like parking lots) that can quickly address emergency programs (like pop-up hospitals) and long-term programs (like greenhouses) as supply chains become localized. Closed environments with positive air-pressure and medical-grade HEPA filters, these soft infrastructures neutralize airborne pathogens and lead towards a new mode of semi-permanent urbanity which moves towards a philosophy of light environmental footprints and cooperative habitation. Varying in size and program, these inflatables can slowly evolve our built environment into soft cities that sponsor new lifestyles, divest of car-based urbanism, and facilitate a more agile urban fabric that is ready to meet the challenges of an uncertain future.” [1]

Excerpt:
1. Alberto de Salvatierra and Dan Hapton, “Soft City, Soft Haus,” in Ground Up Journal Issue 10: Breathe, eds. Claire Geneste and Virginia Wong (Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley, 2021).