Domestic Confinement: Challenges and Learnings
Arquitectos de Cabecera
Home confinement as an outcome of Covid-19 control measures has shifted the way we perceive and use our cities and our homes. In the case of Spain, compulsory full-confinement has taken place for the first five weeks (since March 15th) during which only food provision shops and pharmacies were open, only “essential workers” could attend their jobs, and any outdoor leisure activity or the simple fact of enjoying the street and social relations that emerge from it were banned.
The interiorization of uses most commonly performed in the urban space and the intensification of domestic ones challenges our homes and invites to a critical reading of the domestic space and the city that emerges from it. From the Barcelona-based collective of architects Arquitectos de Cabecera we decided to take the current context as an opportunity to analyse how these new circumstances are changing the way we live in our homes and cities and what can be learned from them.
Our research begun at the studio-unit we run at Barcelona School of Architecture (ETSAB) as an open-source online-based research (www.arquitectosdecabecera.org) and soon started to receive contributions and collaborations from international architects and universities. Upon completion of the first six weeks of confinement, we hereby present some of our findings and conclusions grouped in categories according to the way they impact various aspects of inhabitation.
The first themes: “what does not happen at home”, “what occurs at home”, “a thousand homes in a home” and “from the routine” develop cartographies and analyse the uses and interactions that occur in the domestic space. There can either be an intensification of an existing domestic use or originally unintended new activities that the condition of confinement has brought to the domestic space.The negation of the street and the city has led to a situation in which we demand from housing the difficult role of resolving all of our needs in a single place, reinforcing its use and multiplying the activities that take place at home: work-office, healthcare activities and gym exercises, dance... overlapping with domestic uses like household members care, cooking, cleaning and leisuring. The limitation of the space has pushed dwellers’ inventiveness by incorporating new ways of interpreting and inhabiting the domestic space.
The second group of categories: “windows” and “projection outwards” analyse the perception of the street from the house. The city has lost its ground floor and its public dimension, the few passers-by keep the distance between them avoiding social interaction. The frenetic rhythm of unbridled consumption and that of mass tourism has stopped gentrification processes and tourist accommodation is being offered back to local population. Local and proximity trade has been shut for weeks and face an unprecedented situation of survival that may change the way we understand commerce in our cities forever.
The view projected towards the street takes place from the indoor space. Windows have become even more crucial for the quality of the domestic space and many rooms are proving to have insufficient light or natural ventilation. The balcony, the terrace and the private garden have become three different devices to escape from confinement without leaving home, transgressing confinement while still abiding it. The spaces outside-but-at-home revive us those small sensations linked to the urban: the fresh air, the sun, the decompression of the density of the domestic, the solitude that is now paradoxically found in the exterior and not in the intimate interior. Balconies and terraces of the compact city have shown their true socializing potential reformulating the idea of neighbourhood and community through remote actions.
Privacy is being constantly disclosure through “digital windows” in video conferences, through which we discover details of the personality and private life of speakers. Long-distance virtual meetings have increased as much as local and personal ones have diminished, and timetables have been also reshaped by teleworking routines and meetings, sometimes making it difficult to mentally separate personal and professional life.
Finally, the last categories address situations of exception: “confinement within confinement” is addressing situations like forced quarantine in one’s room for virus-infected, confinement in territorial islands or isolation in the woods away from urban settlements. On the other hand, “imaginary confinements” is a speculation on what can be grasped but not determined and questions notions of privacy and the voluntary disclosement of the personal space.
Our first conclusion is that far away from perceiving the house as a self-contained and self-standing universe, the situation of confinement should reinforce the need of neighbourhoods with a high quality urban space and the “right to the city”. Community-led initiatives are being crucial for many people when the public provision is overwhelmed by the sanitary crisis and the private ones have disappeared. Under these circumstances strong community neighbourhood can certainly offer responses to social needs. That is not to say that they should replace public provision but that public provision should not replace them.
Confinement has also evidenced the impact of regulatory measures in domestic and urban spaces and is challenging once more institutional forms of control and surveillance. Any leisure reading and performative action of the city has been banned from the public space. A fundamental right to the city has been based on the assumption that everybody enjoys another crucial one: the right to an adequate housing. Both of them are being questioned these days.
In addition, housing plays a fundamental role in preventive policies that avoid palliative and many times more costly measures. As a matter of fact, housing has an impact on the quality of life and life expectancy of dwellers, which can represent remarkable economic saving in healthcare.
Regarding the definition of the domestic space itself, there are two dimensions to address: new housing provision to be built in the future, and the major challenge of improving housing stock.
In relation to new housing procurement, this is an opportunity to rethink the project and housing standards. We believe the quality of living should be prioritized over the profit that emerges from housing investment.
The second dimension, the improvement of the existing housing stock, is certainly where the major challenge lies. In a moment of ecological crisis (certainly a positive outcome of global confinement has been the recovery of natural ecosystems) the priority should be the improvement of the existing rather than fostering continuous growth. Besides quantitative parameters regulations and housing improvements should also foster qualitative ones that have an impact on the use and psychological condition of the house and its dwellers: the possibility of walking in multiple paths within the house through multiple doors, non-hierarchical rooms that are big enough to perform multiples uses, the possibility of segregate certain spaces to achieve certain degree of privacy for some members, non-hierarchical spaces that do not pre-determine social hierarchical relations of the household and the inclusion of gender-equality perspective in the domestic space.
Confinement measures have forced us to gain a critical perspective upon our westernized and privileged urban conditions. There are many people who suffer confinement on a daily basis, from elderly with limited mobility trapped in flats without lifts to entire territories at war or migrants in refugee camps. Confinement has also revealed many scenarios of poor housing conditions, lack of adequate housing, urban segregation and inequalities, and how the existing housing conditions have been the outcome of a housing procurement system in which profit has been prioritized.
The sanitary origin of confinement might well have advanced and predicted of of the situations that housing may have to respond in the future. We all will be confined at home during some periods of life (disease, disability), cities population is ageing and will spend more time at home with less physical capacities, teleworking will increase, the potential reduction of work day hours will involve more free time (potentially leisure at home), universal rent and economic deceleration might entail the demise of employment opportunities, world population will keep growing and thus measures will be taken to reduce urban mobility, and a number of undetermined situations that we cannot predict but we suspect will eventually occur.
The current condition of confinement presents a major opportunity to rethink housing and the public space it relates to. We believe we shall not renounce to community spaces and public areas as essential extensions of housing to achieve its maximum potential, but at the same time we must ensure housing offers a high quality environment to its dwellers, both physically, socially and psychologically.
Barcelona, 18 of March 2020, 5th week of confinement
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