The Ideology of Public Space and the New Urban Hygienism: Tactical Urbanism in Times of Pandemic

Abstract

This essay interprets the implementation of “tactical urbanism” as the latest step in the urban technocratic project aimed at destroying or at least subduing all actual urban life, thus as a form of urbicideUrbicide. It presents the case of Barcelona, where in the spring of 2020 the “new municipalism” cityCities council developed several interventions based on tactical urbanism, aiming at guaranteeing a prophylactic environment against the spread of COVID19. Though presented as temporary, these transformations ended up being permanent, combining with other urban policiesUrban policies such as the “superblocks” (supermanzanas), justified as countering climate changeClimate change. The essay argues that these policies aimed at refurbishing outdoor urban spaces reiterate the hygienist vocation of early nineteenth-century urbanism, born as a “science” precisely in the Catalan capital. The growing influence of tactical urbanism is analyzed in the framework of a left-wing municipal government that attempts to develop a new orientation in cityCities governanceGovernance and that employs as a crucial discourse a rhetoric of public spacePublic space as an ethical arena for good citizenship. Though this urbanism is exhibited as environmentally friendly, it is inscribed in a long tradition of policies aimed at sanitizing citiesCities by removing their natural tendency at being spaces for conflict.