In all the major cities of the late capitalist world, we are witnessing a growing process of privatisation of public spaces, understood as places of free concurrence. This privatisation does not only refer to their appropriation in order to put them at the service of private profit. It also refers to their transformation into places of comfort and security in which predictable and trusting relationships reign, inspired by the reference provided by home life. We could refer to the second type of process as the domestication of public space, in the double sense of taming - read deconflictivisation - and adaptation to the mirror provided by the domestic space.

We have long been able to observe this blurring of the opposition between public space and private space. The former, an arena in which individuals exposed themselves to the gaze and judgement of others and accepted standardised rules of conduct based on knowing how to be among strangers. The second, a framework for more uninhibited, sincere and spontaneous behaviour, not determined by the consideration of others. These principles of public-private compartmentalisation are contradicted by behaviour that ignores formalities and in which everyone is invited to act, literally, as if they were at home. The strangers who made up life outside one's own home come to be treated as familiar characters, i.e. as both individuals of everyday acquaintance and members of one's own domestic unit. Thus, among young people, casual fashion forbade, which consists of not ‘dressing up’ for the street, but assuming deliberately relaxed styles of appearance and behaviour, is becoming widespread. The spread of smartphones allows us to see solitary people having conversations, reading personal or intimate messages or even watch videos in places of collective life. It is common to see small groups turning parks or public places into dining halls. It is not uncommon to see neighbours going down to the supermarket to do their shopping in their dressing gowns and pyjamas or nightgowns. These are some examples of how private life colonises public life and superimposes its codes of informality on it. These are some examples of the growing process of “Home-ization” (hogarización) of a public space that until not so long ago was a world of beings who claimed their right to anonymity and that today is a world of presumed acquaintances who must tolerate a not always desirable quasi-home relationship.

This dynamic of transforming public spaces into expansions of private space is finding its urbanistic expression in the implementation in many cities of so-called tactical urbanism, inspired by tactics which, according to Michel de Certeau,1 are the techniques by which the dominated circumvent or defy the impositions of those who dominate them. Already widespread in the 2000s, tactical urbanism involved modifications to the local environment characterised by low cost, playfulness and the use of rudimentary materials, folding picnic furniture, paint to zone pavements and roadways, plastic or concrete bollards, wooden planters or building materials. This urbanism soon generated a whole new street furniture with its own name: Berlin cushions - plastic obstacles on the road to force vehicles to slow down - or New Jersey fences - pieces of concrete painted yellow. One of these actions consisted of the proliferation of parklets, pocket parks that gained space from traffic or car parking.

A hidden truth of public space

The aim of this type of intervention was to promote an innovative recycling of urban space, generating bubbles of social authenticity that recovered the old use of the immediate exteriors of houses, when families spent part of their time in front of their homes and shared their space with their neighbours, while the kids played nearby. Tactical urbanism was offered as a way of providing frameworks for a conviviality preserved from the madding crowd, to evoke the title of Thomas Hardy's famous novel,2 i.e. from an urban life considered cold and soulless, as well as a means of combating atmospheric pollution and climate change. Aimed at creating habitable outdoor plots of land, protected from urban evils, tactical urbanism began to take the form of alternative urban planning and has now become one of the strategies of choice in the capitalist appropriation of cities in an ecological mode and based on a certain humanist sensibility. Today, the virtues of tactical urbanism are part of the moral repertoires in which the spatial turn of neoliberalism, i.e. the consideration of space as one of the main sources of capital gains.3

These urban planning philosophies, aimed at converting the voids between built volumes into something as close as possible to homely living rooms, experienced an acceleration in their application coinciding with the coronavirus pandemic, especially in 2020 and 2021. It was at that time that many world capitals – including Milan, Auckland, Lima, Berlin, Bogota, Barcelona, Vienna, New York and Medellin – started to implement such measures as an emergency measure to curb the pandemic. In almost all cases, this type of public space planning was here to stay, being presented as an opportunity to recover a hidden truth of public space – peaceful and convivial – that the coronavirus epidemic had revealed, as if the expulsion of road traffic and the emergence of spaces of friendliness were the positive part of the lessons that the health disaster had bequeathed to us. 

The state of health emergency caused by the spread of the Covid virus gave rise to all kinds of analyses, diagnoses and prognoses, the premises of which were always those of the irruption of an issue with great disruptive qualities that presaged crucial cultural transformations. On the other hand, another view would note how the state of exception declared in the face of the pandemic and the measures to tackle it excited inertias already active in the organisation of social relations in advanced capitalist societies, above all in places where strangers meet, what we call public space: The conditions demanded for urban life to curb the spread of coronaviruses involved the precipitation of trends stemming from digital technification, the implementation of teleworking and non-face-to-face studies, or the use of platforms for online commerce and leisure, which were already leading to the disorganisation of collective life in general. Further, the new picture imposed by the plague brought to its ultimate moral consequences the malignisation of city life that has accompanied the history of urban modernity since the end of the 18th century.4

Indeed, the way to contain the pandemic in all cities was to regulate and then control the activity in their urban outdoors. Everywhere, we were forced to stay indoors for all or most of the time, to avoid public places and to limit mobility. These measures were accompanied by the obligation to wear masks and to maintain safety distances. This regulation of the use of public spaces meant radical changes in the way we relate to those individuals with whom we do not live, who are now seen as a source of danger. This resulted in desertified public places and then organised on the basis of generalised mutual avoidance.

These imposed ways of using public spaces did not modify but rather exacerbated the principles that governed both contacts and avoidances in a world organised around anonymity and mutual indifference, as described by Georg Simmel in his essays on urban modernity.5 The sanitary insistence on the maintenance of physical distances and the use of the mask made explicit the essence of the modern concept of public life as a social order based on reserve, mutual aloofness and distrust. The total or partial curfew brought about by the pandemic alarm went hand in hand with the valorisation of the home as a place of protection that kept at bay the risks of everything that was alien to it, which extended beyond the door of the house, that outside now more threatening than ever due to the circulation of a criminal virus. The fear of Covid thus restored one of the basic principles of the bourgeois mental universe, which establishes the redoubt of private life as the only safeguard against a chronically insecure exterior, both physically and morally.

Let us remember that the catastrophist critique of the urban experience appears to be responsible for the dissolution of the small, harmonious and homogeneous community, which could only survive through formulas of barracking in single-cell communities projected as the last bastion of congruence and organicity. The whole of Romanticism associates the processes of urbanisation and industrialisation with the destruction of the value-based society and the warmth of human relationships that supposedly characterised rural life. This view was theoretically formalised in 1887 by Ferdinand Tönnies and his contrast between Gemeinschaft or community and Gesellschaft or association, the latter being identified by the coldness and selfishness that dominated urban life.6 Since then and up to the present day, the praise of any idea of community is based on its opposition to an urban experience charged with negative connotations. One of the consequences of this rejection of an urban life conceived as sordid, unpleasant and soulless was the generalisation from the end of the 19th century of the new closed nuclear family, in which everyone could shelter from the desolation and drifting around them in the refuge that constituted this new instance of coexistence called home.7 It is the home itself that is conceived, according to the new family model, as a protection against the vital outdoors of life on the streets. It is in the private sphere that the new urban life that accompanies modernity will find its naturalness, in contrast to a public life perceived as anomic and destructive.

In the new urban-industrial societies, public space became an inhospitable territory in which what had been the warm bonds of the pre-modern community could no longer survive.8 Out there, one encountered only strangers whose intentions one could never be sure of, in a moral desert where there was only indifference, sin and despair. On the contrary, the domestic nucleus was expected to be a shelter from the inclemencies of a public existence based on selfish interest and self-serving pretence. The domestic unit was conceived as a region where, unlike outside, hierarchies and natural laws were respected and where the judgements of an outside world conceived as inhuman did not intervene. This was the function of the new modern family made up of spouses and immature children, following the model of the nest. It is from these cultural changes associated with the emergence of the closed nuclear family that it is established that everyone lives in their own home, a place we call home or living space, which means that each of us lives in our own home, implying that what we do outside it is not life. This was more so than ever in those pandemic times when the home became not only a place of moral security and affection, but also a place of leisure and work.

Home sweet home

That is how the exceptional circumstances that seemed to us to have revived the validity of an anti-street that had long insisted on the poisonous nature of life on the outside. First, during the months of total confinement, it was the decree that established the dwelling itself as the only safe place in the face of an outside that had become all death trap, a mined territory, a space occupied by an invisible army of microscopic killers. Then, when the sanitary measures were relaxed, we were allowed to leave the house with instructions to protect ourselves from others, since everyone, except the so-called cohabitants, became ‘bad company’, possible agents in the service of the epidemic. In this way, every flat became a place to separate dangerous and endangered individuals, who were isolated ‘in the family’ in order to prevent themselves and us from them. Moreover, we were even allowed to move around only if we did so individually or within what was presented as a ‘cohabitation bubble’, an image that refers to that globule of coexisting people isolated from everything around them that makes up the home. Nothing could save us from illness and death that transcended the walls of the family dwelling in which we had been enclosed, as the only guarantee of prophylaxis against an exterior now presented as lethal.

This insistence on showing isolation at home as the main defence against Covid was projected in association with the praise of an imaginary way of cohabitation typical of a no less imaginary universal middle class. Media representations related to the pandemic - news and advertising - insisted on showing families taking advantage of the time spent in seclusion to stage home values. It was ignored how confinement in the home was implying hell for many domestic units, whether because of the overcrowding, the chronic or supervening misery they suffered, the imminent eviction or the daily violence that so many women, children or the elderly endured in their homes. Similarly, the existence of a mass of salaried workers - health workers, service workers, agricultural workers - for whom, forced to work outside the home, salvation at home was not going to be the antidote to illness, was ignored. As if these realities did not exist, the comforts of domestic life, without deprivation, without asymmetries, without forms of submission, where, encapsulated, the family was protected from the dystopian nightmare that had been declared outside its walls, were exhibited as exemplary. That was the positive lesson we were invited to draw from the disaster: the recovery of the mythical ‘home sweet home’, that is, of the closed bourgeois nuclear family withdrawn into itself like a snail. Meanwhile, outside, death was rampant in the streets and what Michel Foucault had called a ‘state of plague’ was declared.9

It was these circumstances unleashed by the coronavirus pandemic, experienced on a planetary scale, that sharpened the perception of urban space as a destructive wasteland and a source of anxiety and the need to reclaim it in a healthier way. At the same time, the hygienist concerns which, in the second half of the 19th century, justified major urban reform initiatives such as those of Baron Haussmann in Paris or Ildefons Cerdà in Barcelona, were revived. While at the time these were macro-policies for the sanitisation of large industrial cities, the massive vaccination operations during the expansion of Covid involved a colossal operation for the sanitisation of their inhabitants, each one conceived as a factor of unhealthiest to be disinfected.

New Sociability and Closeness

It is in this environment marked by the panic caused by the spread of Covid in cities that the imposition of tactical urban planning took place in many cities around the world. Under the restrictions on free movement, with empty streets, major city councils carried out surprise ‘public space revitalisation’ actions in response to the cataclysm. Overnight, chamfered corners and pedestrian areas were painted in colours and geometric shapes, bollards, planters and concrete blocks were distributed as benches, obstacles to vehicular traffic were placed, and deliberately rustic street furniture was widely installed, while at the same time the layout of bicycle lanes was extended. As soon as the confinement measures were deactivated, a large part of what had been public parking spaces were taken over by bar and restaurant terraces to facilitate meetings.

In all cases, the tactical urban planning actions were presented by the authorities and the media as pilot schemes resulting from the health emergency, which were to redistribute the activity of neighbours and passers-by. Attention was drawn to the fact that the changes made to public space not only had prophylactic value but also created an unusual image of public space. Suddenly, citizens could reclaim their immediate surroundings free of cars and communicate with neighbours who were no longer strangers. In addition, people could enjoy moving around on foot or in clean and healthy vehicles in an environment free of atmospheric and acoustic corruption, enjoying the fresh air and the singing of birds. A bucolic setting that provided an image of what could be liberated from impurities, as if the health crisis had something of a silver lining, a lesson to be learned from, an opportunity to rehearse a renewal of urban life as a whole.10 The need then arose for urban planning projects to consider the situation that the crisis had brought about to make the desired prototype of the city a reality. It did so by increasing healthier environments, but, beyond that, by postulating itself as a victory over the intrinsic wickedness of urban life, replacing its inhumanity with the bonds of security and openness supposedly inherent to the ideal domestic space, which were to serve as a new sociability of closeness.

The Covid disaster appeared as the occasion to globally establish planning processes that would combat climate change, but also stimulate good coexistence behaviours, making them acceptable and even desirable for the citizens themselves. In the name of these high values, municipal administrations could modify urban space quickly and cheaply through anecdotal, decorative and peripheral actions, operations without any disruptive implications for neoliberal urbanism, harmless for its control over the regulatory framework that governs territorial planning. Apart from its discourse full of good intentions, the new urban design – alien to its original subversive inspiration – did not propose anything to correct social polarisation, socio-spatial segregation or housing shortages. It did not even really do so about environmental pollution, against which its results were relative. These unresolved issues were at most alleviated, even if they were merely camouflaged or displaced.

Tactical urbanism is one of the expressions of the ‘moral turn’ of the new urban globalisation and its new urbanism, which bases its actions on the certainty that accumulation of capital must be sustainable, inclusive, participatory and, in short, beneficial to humanity. This required a new attempt to rescue and redeem the street as a testimony to the cursed condition of the urban fact and the city as an abomination. In this process, the pandemic broke out, the perfect juncture to promote sanitising measures for public space that would turn it into a replica of the universe of cordiality and affection of the hypothetical bourgeois home, a universe in which the poverty, inequality and conflict that real urban life is made of were inconceivable.