People, Places and Pandemic
The human body has served as a recurring metaphor to describe the complex functioning of cities for more than just a few centuries now. This analogy, between the city and the human body, has been explored in depth by figures as varied as Plato, Vitruvius or Leonardo da Vinci. Urban tissue, a city’s heart, arteries and lungs are some of the terms that comprise the extensive urban planning vocabulary that has been created by comparing fragments of the city with organs or elements of the human anatomy. This analogy, somehow in its usage breathes life into the otherwise non-living elements of the urban fabric. Yet together we witness that a city lives, it breathes, it functions and it grows, just like any other living organism. However, this year- 2020 tested, challenged and perhaps even changed this notion, like it did with many other (read: every other) things.
The beginning of the year saw the world hit by an epidemic, the novel Corona Virus- 19, which came to be declared a pandemic in about mid-March by the World Health Organisation. The following months saw most countries go under an unprecedented lockdown, moderating and limiting activities to bare essentials. While the severity of this was experienced by everyone around the globe, amongst all professional fraternity and discourses, this not-so-mini pause in the lives of the people, ripped cities often being analogised as living organisms, off the living.
The need to stay confined within our homes was of national interest in India, which was practiced with a nation-wide lockdown for a total of 68 days resulting in the people being cut off from the urban life which until then was usually taken for granted, for the city usually ends up receding to the background. With the everyday life, we the ‘CITY’-zens, running on our schedules and with our to-do-lists hardly ever pause and regard ‘The Right to Our City’; a right which we have never had to demand, yet a Right, which when taken away, fragmented our association to our own city.
Parks, gyms, theatres, schools, malls, businesses, industries, all kinds of non-essential (for survival) services paused. What was then realised was that these non-essential activities form the essence of our cities. The noise of the cars honking, the visual of a busy street, of waiting at the traffic signal, the smell of the busy market around the corner of one’s house; all was missed after it was lost, after it was replaced by silence. A silence from the buzz of the urban soundscape which almost resembles the deafening sound you hear when you are underwater.
The virtual worlds of social media became our passages and tunnels to the outside world while staying in. We saw cities and places through a filtered lens. Amongst the lock down bingos, throwback travel pictures and the cooking spree were bereft visuals of the city and urban spaces when photographers took upon social media to share videos of empty metropolitan cities, of empty streets, isolated public squares and secluded tourist destinations. While initially, the visuals evoked the thoughts of how the earth was breathing again and how nature finally got a break to repair and rejuvenate; experiencing that space, usually chirping with activity in silence is another story. For the eeriness seems serene in images but daunting in experience.
I, being under a 21 day quarantine myself, often found myself asking friends and family who could step out — “How was it being on the streets of our city?” Being told they were ‘silent’ and ‘dead’, still, however never prepared me for the sight of my city, my streets without people. It was not mine anymore. The ghosted and deserted city I experienced was one that had jumped right out of a sci-fi movie, just after the catastrophe hits. What I ponder often is, are we being robbed of ‘Our right to our City’ when it doesn’t feel like our own?
It was not the streets that were missing, nor the institutions and shopping complexes either. The Taj Mahal still stood in Agra, in its grandeur; the Eiffel tower in Paris, the Gateway of India still stood observing the Arabian Sea yet these icons seemed to lose their appeal without them buzzing with activities and people. This Covid-19, sure taught the world resilience and plenty many other things. What it also demonstrated is that ‘It is the Humanscape that completes an Urbanscape.’
