Lockdown Paper

The Quarterly Journal of Design Summer 2020

N W O D K C R E O L PAP A series of design reflections from the pandemic.

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Disegno: Lockdown Paper Special Edition, Summer 2020

Masthead

Essays

Editor-in-chief Oli Stratford, oliver@disegnomagazine.com

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Into the Grid Words by Mimi Zeiger

Deputy editor Kristina Rapacki, kristina@disegnomagazine.com

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The New Ballet of the Sidewalk Words by Rory Hyde

Creative directors Florian Böhm and Annahita Kamali, akfb.com

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Notes from a Period of Furlough Words by Johanna Agerman Ross

Designer Jonas Hirschmann, studio@akfb.com

23 The Mask Generation Words by Nanjala Nyabola

Publisher and commercial director Chris Jones, chris@disegnomagazine.com

24 Zoonotic Spaces Words by Oli Stratford

Commercial executive Farnaz Ari, farnaz@disegnomagazine.com

27 Optimising for Brunch Words by Dan Hill

Creative producer Evi Hall, eleanor@disegnomagazine.com

29 Covid Curating Words by Glenn Adamson

Founder and director Johanna Agerman Ross

Designers’ Reflections

Paper and print This publication is printed by Park Communications on Nautilus Classic 100% Recycled 90gsm, provided by Mondi.

Cover The front cover of this publication shows a photograph taken by Fernando Campana (see p. 15).

Content copyright The content of this publication belongs to Disegno and to the authors and artists. If you are tempted to reproduce any of it, please ask first.

Contact us Disegno Studio 2, The Rose Lipman Building 43 De Beauvoir Road London N1 5SQ +44 20 7249 1155 disegnodaily.com

11 The Fabrick Lab thefabricklab.com 11 Formafantasma formafantasma.com 12 Talin Hazbar talin-hazbar.com 13 Phil Cuttance philcuttance.com 14 gt2P gt2p.com 14 Mos Architects mos.nyc 15 Estudio Campana campanas.com.br 17 Rahul Mehrotra rmaarchitects.com 17 Samuel Ross a-cold-wall.com 18 Maria Jeglinska-Adamczewska mariajeglinska.eu 19 Clara von Zweigbergk claravonzweigbergk.se 20 Space Popular spacepopular.com 20 Fabien Cappello fabiencappello.com 21 Fala falaatelier.com 21 Bethan Laura Wood bethanlaurawood.com

Lockdown Paper

Around the world, lockdown restrictions are beginning to ease. It has been the best part of four months spent under the aegis of limited free movement, activity, and congregation – measures introduced in a bid to limit the transmission of Covid-19.

This next period will bring a host of uncertainties.

As countries seek to recover from both the loss of human life and the harm of lasting economic damage, they must also mitigate against a virus that continues to infect people the world over. In such a situation, it is impossible to predict what will happen next.

This publication is not in the business of prediction, nor is it a record of the virus or the experiences of those directly affected by it. Instead, it aims to offer reflection on the preceding period, as well as providing early thoughts on some of the design phenomena that have come into focus during the pandemic. Fifteen designers have shared their experiences of life under lockdown, while seven writers and critics have penned essays on topics ranging from public transport and physical distancing, to video conferencing and masks.

Undercutting many of these topics are the ideas surrounding social justice and racial equality that have been raised by the Black Lives Matter protests. The essays in this newspaper were commissioned before the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, but many were written concurrently to the subsequent protests. As with the pandemic itself, there is more to be written about the issues raised by Black Lives Matters. These essays are far from exhaustive, and we will be revisiting many of the issues raised when we return to our regular publication schedule with the quarterly journal later this year.

As the world seeks to regroup from Covid-19, it must grapple with uncertainties that run deeper than simply adjusting to the legacy of the virus. The coronavirus has temporarily done away with normal life. We must be careful not to return to it wholesale.

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INTO THE GRID

Words by Mimi Zeiger You have been invited. Join meeting. Mute.

Unmute. Show video. Mute, unmute, hide video.

Show video. Hide self view. Mute. Share screen.

“It’s like the Brady Bunch.”

“We’ve entered the Matrix.”

“It’s like Max Headroom.”

“How are you holding up?”

“I think you’re muted.”

Unmute. My dog howls at an ambulance siren and jumps into my lap, his tail all but blocking my view of the screen. Mute.

Unmute. “Thanks, everyone.” Wave goodbye.

We Zoom, we Hangout, we live stream, we conference.

This is not exactly how we are living, per se.

This is how we are meeting, working, teaching, learning, organising, day drinking, and dating in this moment. Here, in the grid. Of which, in a previous century, Rosalind Krauss wrote was both spatial and temporal – and myth.

Abstracted from our bodies, we come together in approximations of what used to be normal activities. The extent to which we share our selves is mediated by the specifications of camera hardware on computers, iPads, and phones.

Fear and grief are tucked behind shelves of books with suspiciously curated titles.

The mess, exhaustion, and anxiety of sharing homes with partners, lovers, and children during this pandemic is masked by the thinnest scrim of virtual backgrounds.

I want to choose an ocean scene, maybe one by Hiroshi Sugimoto, where the horizon line is a taut boundary between elements. Air and water stretch out ad infinitum to places beyond where our widening butts are wedged into

ergonomic chairs, places untouched by Covid-19.

But my laptop’s processor is too old for the virtual background software to operate.

“Every time I see the sea, I feel a calming sense of security, as if visiting my ancestral home; I embark on a voyage of seeing,” said Sugimoto of his Seascapes. And it is from our homes, imperfect sites of security and quarantine, that we look out through a sea of network infrastructure to see each other.

FAITH Six-thirty am, on a first Sunday under stay-athome orders, my boyfriend’s phone vibrates multiple times against the bedside table.

We both wake up, confused and groggy.

This happens again the following week and the next. By Easter Sunday, he is ready. Poised at his desk before dawn, he has filled two giant displays with information about the traffic flowing through the network of a large, well-known digital conferencing company for which he works. One monitor visualising the peaks and valleys of traffic flowing in and out of servers around the world. Los Angeles crests uncomfortably. Miami, too. The charts are seemingly geologic in nature – strata in shades of primordial algae green, slate blue, fungal yellow. Each one recording the vitals of a piece of hardware connected to another via a spaghetti of fibre optic cabling.

It took us a while to figure out what was going on. Throughout the work week data loads from phone and video calls had rapidly increased, sending the engineering team scrambling to make accommodations, like a Star Trek crew trying to maximise power to the warp core. But the Sunday peak came as a surprise. High water lasted most of the morning, receding around noon. Church services, we concluded – a hypothesis later confirmed by the sales and marketing team, which had successfully enticed congregations with the idea that a bridge call could get them one step closer to God. Another time, an Orthodox Jewish study group complains to the help desk about glitchy connections and dropped calls. The engineers spend the next week trying to fix the issue.

The solution had to do with geography, I think.

Stateside servers begin managing the capacity by flinging Torah portions and Midrash lessons out into the diaspora. A call from an enclave in Brooklyn routed to a rack of servers in Frankfurt, Germany. It’s fast, but imperfect.

We’ve literally put our faith in the network.

What is the internet if not a belief in something largely invisible, unpredictable, and omniscient?

217,000 TERABYTES A MONTH From December 2019 to March 2020, Zoom’s daily meeting participants increased from 10 to 200 million as schools, universities, corporations, non-profits, governments, media outlets, art and cultural organisations grasped for ways to retain some sense of business as usual. Initially seen as a saviour, the video conferencing app was in fact rife with security and privacy problems: playing fast and loose with user data; lacking end-to-end encryption; and replete with flaws in the software that allowed for spyware, phishing, and hijacking.

But in April, Consumer Reports noted that Zoom wasn’t alone in its dubious practices.

Cisco Webex, Microsoft’s Teams and Skype, and Google’s Duo, Meet, and Hangouts raised similar concerns regarding privacy and data harvesting. “According to their privacy policies, 6

all three companies can collect data while you’re in a videoconference, combine it with information from data brokers and other sources to build consumer profiles, and potentially tap into the videos for purposes like training facial recognition systems,” wrote reporter Allen St. John. Those are the very same facial recognition systems that are known for racial bias, thus reinforcing police profiling and criminalisation of Black populations.

This exchange of personal data for digital services is nothing new. We all skim terms of service contracts and upload our lives to Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok. Under Covid-19 lockdowns, however, Zoom and other conferencing platforms seem to foster higher levels of intimacy than social media. While social media broadcasts enhanced versions of ourselves – selves with duckface and jet setter itineraries – Zoom knows what we look like when we are bored in a meeting, continually sneaking peaks at our talking heads to ensure that we don’t look fat or that our visages haven’t fallen into resting bitch face.

Which is to say that our identities are vulnerable to the creeps who crawl into networks, but also to ourselves. These self-conscious performances are not simply aggregated for a two-hour meeting. They are trafficked across geographies, landing briefly in colocation centres where they may be copied or scraped, before zipping headlong through dark fibre for that 9:30am call.

Such dislocations exasperate questions of local and global, selfhood and nationhood.

In April, the United States Department of Homeland Security warned government and law-enforcement agencies that Zoom is a risky gamble and a target for foreign spies. “China’s access to Zoom servers makes Beijing uniquely positioned to target US public and private sector users,” the agency’s report read – a statement that Zoom quickly called inaccurate and misinformed, forcing users to individually decipher truth from fiction, caution from nationalist xenophobia.

Even in these virtual commons, place matters.

Zoom data is managed through a global array of regional data centres – Australia, Canada, China, Europe, India, Japan, Hong Kong, Latin America, and the US. In mid-April, Zoom capitulated to growing doubts around routing traffic through its servers in China, issuing a new policy that allowed “every paid Zoom Meeting and Webinar customer” to opt in or out of specific data centre regions.

By late April, Zoom’s network traffic had begun to apply pressure to its capacity, and the company signed with the tech company Oracle to offload its burgeoning traffic to cloudbased infrastructure. By June, it admitted to suspending accounts of Hong Kong and US-based pro-democracy activists, and shutting down commemorations of the Tiananmen Square massacre at China’s request. Contrite, the company said it would start developing new technology to enable it to block users based on geography, so as not to “[impact] users outside of mainland China”.

HACKED A dozen architecture academics from the University of Michigan, and four or five times more thesis students at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, gather in a Zoom meeting so that the students can present their work to a jury for an end-of-year prize.

It’s early May. Online teaching has been in effect for some six weeks and there’s a relative ease as each screen is shared, each project offered up in seamless pixels for critique.

The room, if we can call this collection of digital doppelgängers a room, is festive. Students have coordinated their virtual backgrounds to match their projects. (This will be a theme I see across many of the juries I sit on from April to June.) The winners will soon be announced.

I’m in the middle of a comment when the chat is hacked by a user named Jay. It’s 3:17pm when expletives and racial epithets vomit onto the screen: FXXXING NXXXX YOU FXXXING NXXXX YOU FXXXING NXXXX YOU FXXXING NXXXX YOU over and over until the words form long columns, almost a grid akin to the Modern paintings that so fixate Krauss. That capitalised YOU, a finger pointing at your chest, pierces the screen.

We are all captive, frozen in that endless moment, and reeling from the violation. A space we thought was private, even intimate, is less than safe.

The words accumulate more quickly than a person might type. Jay can’t be a real individual, can he? A 4chan teenage troll with disruption on his mind? Clearly, this is a script or a bot – an avatar without the same conflicting selfhoods the rest of us negotiate onscreen.

Or not. With the hindsight gained following the killing of George Floyd and global protests to end police violence and systemic racism, I realise that our Zoombomber is no prank. Jay is what lies just under the veneer of civic life. While we politely pantomime acts of commonality in these meetings and webinars, parallel subreddits listen for dog whistles.

Since I’m speaking, I raise the issue. “Hey, let’s stop for a second.” The organiser unmutes and says to the administrative host, “Can you kick Jay out?”

And with that, Jay’s gone.

We applaud the student winners with clapping emojis.

Leave meeting.

Mimi Zeiger is a Los Angeles-based critic, editor, and curator.

THE NEW BALLET OF THE SIDEWALK

Words by Rory Hyde On my daily state-sanctioned walk around the neighbourhood in locked-down London, I’ve noticed a new pedestrian etiquette emerging.

In an effort to keep a 2m distance from others – roughly the same width as most footpaths – my fellow ramblers and I have been forced into a strange choreography of avoidance.

We cross over to pass around each other, or tuck ourselves between cars to let a family through. We have developed a subtle form of signalling, a tilt of the head to declare that I will cede this space to you, and hopefully we will both be safe. Mask wearers look at us bare-facers with narrow eyes, passing with an excessively wide berth. My neighbours are displeased to have been cast in this new ballet of the sidewalk, not having auditioned. “We’re always looking to see who will cross over, or where we can get past, it’s exhausting!”

There’s only so much a makeshift etiquette can do to overcome these stresses. There simply isn’t enough room. How might we redesign the street to keep us safe and sane in the post-pandemic world?

Urbanists and city-makers have been screaming “Widen the footpaths, build more bike lanes!” for decades, believing that the future of the city lies with the pedal and the foot, not with the car.

Previously, these calls have been largely ignored, but the pandemic has seen the future they describe rushed into the present. While buses and trains seek to reduce numbers and insist passengers wear face masks, walking and cycling have emerged as the safest way to get around.

Cities have announced millions in investment in new cycle lanes and wider footpaths, setting out on a radically ambitious transformation of streets.

Lockdown Paper

Milan was one of the first out the gate. As its rate of new coronavirus cases began to subside in mid-April, the city announced its Strade Aperte plan for 35km of streets to be made bike and pedestrian friendly. New cycle lanes and wider footpaths have been created using the low-cost and low-tech tools of paint and flexible bollards, as well as reduced speed limits for cars, with work due to be completed by the end of the summer. As further scientific evidence emerges of the relationship between air pollution and deaths caused by the virus, there is a great incentive to ensure these changes aren’t merely temporary.

“Of course, we want to reopen the economy, but we think we should do it on a different basis from before,” Milan’s deputy mayor Marco Granelli told The Guardian. The city is eager to shift people’s habits by making it easier and more convenient to walk or cycle than it is to drive – even after restrictions are lifted.

London announced plans in mid-May to ban cars on the busiest roads in the city’s financial district to help people safely return to work in the coming months. The star-shaped intersection of Cannon Street will be almost completely pedestrianised – a total transformation from the noisy car-dominated space it was at the start of the year – and a large stretch of Park Lane has already been converted into a protected cycling zone, with miles more planned across the city.

Will Norman, London’s walking and cycling commissioner, sees the plan as critical to increasing capacity and reducing pressure on buses and tubes. “We have no choice,” he said.

“This is not ideological opportunism. This is a necessity.” Sales of bikes in the UK have risen by up to 200 per cent as key workers switch to avoid public transport and commuters begin to tentatively plan a return to the office. Could this mark the tipping point in how Londoners get around?

But no city is as ambitious about this future as Paris. The city’s transformation from carchoked to green and open has been underway for some time – the pandemic has only made these efforts appear more prescient. Mayor Anne Hidalgo has for years worked to green Paris, committing to make every street bike-friendly by 2024, and banning all combustion engine cars from the centre by 2030. This is no temporary fix.

These plans are bolstered by major investment in infrastructure, with around €38bn being spent on the Grand Paris Express project, which will create 68 new metro stations, as well as plans for thousands of affordable homes, many of which are scheduled for completion in advance of the 2024 Olympic Games. As Jean-Louis Missika, the city’s deputy mayor for urbanism, is reported to have said: you can either treat the Paris accords on climate as empty virtue signalling or take them seriously. Paris intends to take them seriously.

All of this makes much social, environmental, and economic sense. I lived in the Netherlands for a number of years and can attest that life on a bike is healthy, uplifting and convenient.

There’s a wonderful feeling in being part of a swarm of bikes, sweeping around a canal bend, navigating with hand gestures, and sharing someone’s slipstream as you ride into the wind.

With the right infrastructure in place, this experience can be shared right across society; it need not just be the province of the young and fit. The famous Dutch Bakfiets cargo bikes are put to work like a family wagon, with two kids up front and one on the back. And no weather is too poor – I saw my elderly neighbours unlocking their bikes in the driving snow. “You just have

to take it slowly round the bends,” they said to my astonishment.

This is only possible because of separated, protected cycleways that continue through most intersections, and which reach across the country. But making these kinds of changes does not come easy. The Dutch weren’t gifted their bike lanes – they were hard won in a battle against traffic planners and property developers, following a staggering number of children killed by cars in the early 1970s. There were protests across the country, creating the safe streets movement; government policies to encourage cycling; and a huge investment in infrastructure.

The popularity of cycling exploded, creating a virtuous circle, as more cyclists empowered subsequent governments to invest further.

With the current pandemic, many cities, including London, are seizing upon this brief window of opportunity to make similar changes to urban streets. But there is a danger in moving too quickly. By rushing through its schemes, the city has adopted an “ask for forgiveness, not permission” approach, brushing aside the usual process of community consultation and engagement as it leaps to dig up the roads.

This implies that the work of engaging local communities is an impediment to the delivery of projects and is merely about gathering public support to ease the passage of schemes which have already been decided. While it’s true that these processes can add time to a project – years, in some cases – they are critical for ensuring that any changes made are equitable, and that those who make the changes are accountable. In the case of London, such a process of consultation would most likely have led to a different set of proposals, and a different set of priorities.

Why do the proposed cycle lanes largely serve Zone 1, for instance? Why are street closures so centred on the financial district? Who are these changes really benefitting?

These questions become all the more urgent in light of the Black Lives Matter protests that have erupted following the killing of George Floyd

by Minneapolis police. What does it mean to talk about “safe streets” at a time when Black people are being attacked and killed in these same streets, by officers appointed by the city? Who are these streets “safe” for? Kristen Jeffers, founder of The Black Urbanist, a resource that centres on Black, queer, feminist, urbanist voices, is clear on this question. Speaking in an interview with StreetsBlog USA, Jeffers points out that “Our streets have never really been safe for black people,” highlighting the fact that many cities coming out of lockdown have allowed restaurants to place tables on pavements to let (predominantly white) customers socially distance, while offering no such possibility to the (predominantly Black or minority ethnic) workers in the kitchen. These workers, Jeffers notes, are “essentially [being] forced into front-line jobs. But when black people choose [to] gather to participate in political speech – even when people gather to participate in protests in support of black people – well, of course that’s still an issue. So it’s like, how do we create a system where people can choose to be on the front lines? And then, how can we create a transportation system that supports those choices?”

These are not issues that can be resolved quickly or didactically. “[Quick-build] equity won’t pull us from the grips of structural racism that got us here,” explains Destiny Thomas, an anthropologist-planner from Oakland, California, writing on Citylab in June in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests.

“In April, when cities offered miles of road closures as a policy response to the pandemic, many Black planners – women in particular – spoke up about the dangers of excluding entire communities from public processes, and interrogated the open streets narrative for exploiting Black, Brown and Indigenous death to justify entitlement to recreation.

But we were written off as the champions of ‘the enemy of progress’ – that is, equity.”

Thomas’s point is that the various issues currently facing urbanism should not be considered in isolation and that, instead, cities’ responses “to Covid-19 and civil unrest could [instead] atone for how hostile our urban spaces have been for so many.” Rather than pitting the urban responses to the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests against one another, could they be two sides of the same coin?

A report by Public Health England confirmed that mortality risk among those diagnosed with Covid-19 is higher in BAME groups than white ethnic groups. While the report did not reach any definitive conclusions as to the cause of this, it did suggest that “BAME communities are likely to be at increased risk of infection. This is because BAME people are more likely to live in urban areas[…], in overcrowded households[…], in deprived areas[…], and have jobs that expose them to higher risk[…].” In other words, the risk is greater because of how underlying racial inequality is manifest in the spatial and economic structure of the city. Yet a number of scientists have argued that the report did not go far enough, criticising the authors for ignoring air pollution as a potential factor in explaining this higher risk to ethnic minorities from Covid-19. “I find it astonishing that they didn’t look at air pollution,” Rosamund Kissi-Debrah, a World Health Organisation advocate for health and air quality told The Guardian. “Some people will say air pollution in itself is racism because, yet again, it disproportionately affects black people – Covid-19 has just made it more obvious.”

These issues are deep, and they will not be solved by urban design, no matter how progressive or enlightened it is. But equally, it would be wrong to dismiss bike lanes as merely the ignorant dream of privileged urbanists. The reduction in traffic due to the coronavirus lockdown has cut nitrogen dioxide pollutionin London by close to half in some areas, with similar reductions recorded in other major cities globally. This stands to benefit all, especially those ethnic minorities who are disproportionately exposed to it. At a time when it seems fast change is possible in matters that have been traditionally slow-moving, we would be foolish to simply return to “normal”. Instead we must use this moment to question the old structures of power and oppression that have shaped our cities, and redefine a “new normal” that places the voices of communities at the centre, especially those that have been overlooked for too long.

Rory Hyde is curator of contemporary architecture and urbanism at the V&A, and design advocate for the Mayor of London.

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NOTES FROM A PERIOD OF FURLOUGH

Words by Johanna Agerman Ross Despite, or perhaps because of its cumbersome title, the 19th-century volume A Subaltern’s Furlough: Descriptive of Scenes in Various Parts of the United States, Upper and Lower Canada, New-Brunswick, and Nova Scotia, During the Summer and Autumn of 1832, Volume 1, goes some way towards enabling an understanding of the traditional use of the word “furlough”.

To unpick that lengthy descriptor, however, we first need to understand what a subaltern is.

A quick check in the search bar reveals: “an officer in the British army below the rank of captain, especially a second lieutenant.” (It is also a word used in postcolonial studies, but that is another matter.) It seems, then, that furlough is a rather antiquated word, and one connected to the British Army. And as the book’s title is “Descriptive of Scenes”, rather than barracks or battlefields, we can assume that the subaltern is on leave.

By the looks of it, an extended leave, in which he explored Northeast Canada and the United States by horse-drawn coach.

So then, what is furlough? Well, it’s a leave of absence. It’s a term with connections to the penitentiary system, where inmates can be furloughed in order to temporarily leave prison.

It’s also a term employed by missionaries to describe the periods when they return home.

In all cases, it seems that to be on furlough is to be displaced, or rather placed, in a context other than that in which you currently exist.

It can be a period of rest from daily duties (or confinement), but it can also be a period in which the time is used to learn and expand your horizons while recuperating. The subaltern’s furlough seems to have been terribly efficient.

Not only did he cross the Atlantic at a time when

such endeavours were not easy, and explore parts of a continent he was not familiar with, but he also wrote two books along the way. (Yes, happily there is a second volume of A Subaltern’s Furlough).

I envy the subaltern. He spent his furlough as we’ve been led to believe you should spend furlough – expanding your mind and lived experience. “I came to the determination of availing myself of a short leave of absence from my military duties to cross the Atlantic,” he writes. “I much regretted that circumstances would not permit a longer stay in so attractive a portion of the globe”. The subaltern – whose name is Edward Thomas Coke, by the way – seemed to do everything right when he was on furlough. I, on the other hand, seemed to do everything wrong.

Then again, I didn’t “avail myself” of my recent furlough. Although I was fortunate to be in a position to be furloughed in the first place, it was an odd feeling to go from working to meet intense deadlines one week, to a locked email account the next. No amount of preparedness prepares you for that. The lockdown meant that I was not allowed to leave my home for more than an hour a day. A trip outside of my local neighbourhood was unthinkable, let alone either upper or lower Canada. During this time, even fundamental tasks such as finding loo-roll, felt almost insurmountable.

Concern at the way the virus is being handled in the UK has preoccupied a lot of my thinking (at the time of writing, more than 42,000 people have died from coronavirus in Britain, the third highest death toll in the world) and no amount of volunteering in the local community or reading about issues surrounding it has made me feel in any way useful. As the days went by, I felt pathetic and useless. The space for expanding one’s mind and horizons (even metaphorically) seemed at best limited, at worst futile. Of course, I was not the only person on furlough. Almost 9 million people across Britain found themselves in the exact same situation. Among Europe’s five biggest economies – Germany, France, the UK, Italy and Spain – more than 30 million workers have applied to have their wages paid by the state through various short-term leave schemes.

So then, what is furlough? In the context of Covid-19, it’s a hastily designed financial bail-out package geared towards supporting businesses and organisations at a time of unprecedented economic crisis. The UK’s furlough scheme was announced by the chancellor Rishi Sunak in March, even though until now “furlough” has not been a recognised term in UK employment law. (It is in the US, however, where furloughing is more like a sacking – a sudden unpaid release.)

With consumer spending drastically shrinking during the lockdown (levels contracted in the UK by more than a third in April), it was inevitable that businesses would require assistance.

To make up for the lack of income from trade, the government stepped in to cover 80 per cent of salaries for employees, enabling job retention and staving off widespread redundancies and certain unemployment. By early June, the scheme had cost the UK government almost £20bn, with some estimates suggesting that this will rise to £80bn by the end of October.

But there was one significant caveat to the newly conceived UK scheme – in order to qualify, employees were not allowed to work for their employer during the furlough period.

The model for the UK furlough system, and many like it across Europe, is Germany’s Kurzarbeit, or “Short-Time Work Allowance

Scheme”, which was created in response to the 2008 recession. In the event of an economic downturn, the Kurzarbeit allows an employer to reduce an employee’s working hours to as few as zero, with the federal employment agency then guaranteeing 60 per cent of their pay for the hours not worked. In France, a version of the same scheme is called Chômage partiel, and in Spain Expediente de Regulación Temporal de Empleo (ERTE). What they all have in common, and which is different to the British furlough model, is that employees can still work for their employer, albeit on a part-time basis.

So then, what is furlough? One idea is that it’s an unprecedented move by a British Conservative government to pay a significant portion of people’s salaries and insist they do nothing in return. In fact, it recalls one of the main campaign slogans of Andrew Yang in the US’s 2020 Democratic presidential primaries.

Yang championed the “Freedom Dividend”, or a universal basic income for all citizens.

“Automation has already eliminated about 4 million manufacturing jobs in the United States since 2000,” wrote Yang in his 2018 book The War on Normal People – The Truth About America’s Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income is our Future. “Instead of finding new jobs, a lot of those people left the workforce and didn’t come back. The U.S. labor force is now only at 62.9 percent, a rate below that of almost all other industrialized economies[…].”

In recognition of a changing labour landscape – where the gig economy, automation, and the decreasing power of unions have combined to leave people vulnerable and with insufficient fiscal protection and support from the state – a universal wage is a concept that is fast gaining momentum in many countries. Even Pope Francis has waded into the debate, using a letter penned during Easter 2020 to argue that “This may be the time to consider a universal basic wage which would acknowledge and dignify the noble, essential tasks you carry out. It would ensure and concretely achieve the ideal, at once so human and so Christian, of no worker without rights.”

In what seemed like a perfectly orchestrated move, around one month into the UK’s furlough scheme Helsinki University released its findings from Finland’s 2017-18 experiment into creating a government-backed basic income. For two years, 2,000 randomly selected unemployed Finnish citizens were given €560 every month, regardless of whether they found a job. The study was the first of its kind, ultimately revealing that while basic income made little difference to the subjects’ employment status, it did have a significantly positive effect on their general health and stress levels. The British furlough scheme is somewhat similar to the Finnish experiment, insofar as furloughed employees receive their wages as a matter of course, while still remaining free to work and make income from other sources according to the terms of their contract. Is it possible, then, that the British government has unwittingly unleashed something akin to the world’s broadest trial of a universal wage? Could the scheme be an inadvertent precursor to a future where every citizen is finally considered deserving of a certain financial security? Perhaps, but then the scheme fell far short of this in reality – while self-employment was partially covered by a separate scheme, many people still fell through the cracks. The non-profit organisation Excluded UK, for instance, estimates that about 3 million British taxpayers, many of whom are in the creative industries, are not eligible for Lockdown Paper

either the furlough or self-employed income support scheme.

So then, what is furlough? Far from a word steeped in military tradition, it now serves as something of an encapsulation of our time.

A few weeks into lockdown, in another strange coincidence, Yale University Press published Slowdown – The End of the Great Acceleration and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives. The book’s author Danny Dorling, Oxford University’s Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography, uses data science to argue that we are living through a time of deceleration, with the world having already seen the peak of urbanisation, rapid technological advance, population growth and economic growth. Sadly, the only thing still accelerating at unprecedented rates, Dorling finds, is global warming.

“Our current slowdown represents a huge challenge to the expectation of acceleration and a step into the unknown,” notes Dorling in the book – a sentence that triggered a moment of déjà-vu when I read it during lockdown.

“To what extent are our current belief systems (economic, political, and otherwise) built on assumptions of rapid future technological change and perpetual economic growth? Accepting that a slowdown is upon us will require us to shift our fundamental view of change, innovation and discovery as unalloyed benefits. Will we be able to accept that we should stop expecting ceaseless technological revolutions?”

While many consumers, I think, would be welcoming of such a reality, the world’s financial systems are built on growth, measured through gross domestic product (GDP). “GDP is the way we measure and compare how well or badly countries are doing,” notes the economist Diane Coyle in her book GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History. “But this is not a question of measuring a natural phenomenon like land mass or average temperature to varying degrees of accuracy.

GDP is a made-up entity.” After three months of various government-enforced lockdowns, however, which have seen GDP fall around the world, we may need to start considering whether it’s not time to move on from the fiction.

In May 2019, New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern revealed the world’s first “wellbeing budget”, a scheme that pledged to prioritise the health and welfare of citizens.

“We need to address the societal wellbeing of our nation, not just the economic wellbeing,” Ardern had previously argued, with the new budget pledging NZ$1.9bn towards mental health services, and NZ$320m towards combatting domestic violence, amongst other measures. Like Finland’s universal wage experiment, New Zealand’s budget suggests that societal success may be more complex than fetishising GDP. In light of a global pandemic that has devastated so many lives (and which will continue to do so for some time), you would think that such ideas might catch on.

So then, what is furlough? Perhaps it’s just an old word, one preferred by subalterns and the like, but it’s one that may be worth paying closer attention to in the years ahead.

In the post-pandemic recovery, it’s unlikely to be the last word in growing calls for a universal wage.

Johanna Agerman Ross is curator of twentiethcentury and contemporary furniture and product design at the V&A, and the founder of Disegno.

28 New stem series with 28 by Omer Arbel Standard fixtures and bespoke installations

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1 The Fabrick Lab, Elaine Yan Ling Ng My last boarding pass was printed on 26 march 2020.

Since then, I’ve been in Hong Kong, going through quarantine, lockdown, and practicing social distancing while projects have been cancelled or placed on hold.

With all of this unexpected free time, I’ve been tidying up forgotten treasures in my studio.

Currently atop the messy pile is Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things by Michael Braungart and William McDonough. In fact, my tidying approach has been guided by Cradle to Cradle’s advice to “see waste as food, as a nutrient for what’s to come[…] it is about being beneficial, about not panicking and destroying resources that we can pass onto our grandchildren and their grandchildren.”

I have spent eight weeks going through six years of work, such that my studio has become my personal journal. In the bottom of my trunk I found a resurrection plant – I began my studio in 2014 with Climatology, a textile collection that was inspired by this plant’s survival skills during periods of dehydration. Over this period, it has become my key subject for sketching, abstract photography and meditation.

This journey of rediscovery reminded me why I started this studio. My love and passion for making unusual, uncanny objects doesn’t make sense to anyone but myself. They’re objects that don’t fit the purposes of now, but of the future.

2 Formafantasma For a few years we have wanted to adopt a dog and during the lockdown he finally arrived. His name is Terra. As we write these lines, he is crawling on the floor and looking in our direction to check we approve of the things he’s chewing up.

Living with Terra is simultaneously rewarding and confrontational. The process of educating him to cohabit with us is a constant learning process, as well as an exercise in interspecies communication. At another time we would have enjoyed this experience without too much thought, but the pandemic has inevitably affected our perceptions.

As humans, we have shaped the evolution of dogs, and a process of constant mediation is still needed to establish any sense of mutual belonging between animals. This constant exchange with another creature fills us with joy and hope. Humans have the ability to not only empathise with other species, but to live alongside them and potentially build worlds together. This is what we believe we need the most in a post-pandemic world.

Right now, Terra is sleeping on our laps.

His paws are slightly shaking. Who knows what he is dreaming about.

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3 Talin Hazbar What a surreal time to live through.

Nevertheless, amid all this chaos there’s been a moment of stillness – I’m at a standstill, while other events are accelerating in parallel.

It’s as though time has expanded and become infinite. I have needed to pause and make sense of the silence – some days have been easier to manage, while others have seemed grim. But in order to move forward, you need make do with what you have. The social interaction with my direct family members has been a blessing and a comfort. Other pieces of pre-pandemic life have slowly morphed into the new norm.

It has been a process, and I still haven’t fully comprehended what I want to achieve and see in the future. The constant change, and events now running alongside the pandemic, have made every day seem like a transitional phase – hopefully into something better.

(Image by Tulip Hazbar.)

4 Phil Cuttance I was on a working holiday in New Zealand when the lockdown occurred. I was lucky enough to be able to set myself up in my sister’s spare room and create a new “studio” space in the backyard.

I had all the basic materials I use to create my moulded jesmonite objects – it was fortunate that the lo-fi process I’ve been playing with for years turned out to be “lockdown friendly”. Inspired

by Martino Gamper’s 100 chairs in 100 days project, I decided to try and make a uniquely shaped vase every day. I hoped it would force me to experiment with my process, which I had feared had become a bit stagnant.

I’m up to vase No.46 today. Despite having missed a few days, I’ve found myself loosening up creatively and trying new things. I don’t love all the vases I have made, but this suggests that the project has worked. I feel incredibly grateful to have been in this position during this time, which has been so difficult for so many.

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5 gt2P, Guillermo Parada The quarantine has had many effects, not least the fact that our stopped lives have accelerated the digital revolution by modifying our ways of sharing, working, studying, and buying. Despite the digital nature of these processes, however, they still always interface with the physical world.

Take the pair of grey slippers that I ordered from Amazon. They were red when they arrived, despite the object code being correct. That digital error turned out to be a pleasant surprise.

Isn’t it wonderful to see how desire, prompted by a digital image, can be turned into a binary code which in turn produces something material on our doorstep? Isn’t it wonderful to think about how algorithms, neural networks, binary networks and automated robotic processes can intermingle and become susceptible to error? Regardless of their digital nature, these are ultimately human processes and expressions.

This encounter between digital and physical worlds is a topic of interest in our studio’s work.

The piece pictured here is a study from a project under development, based on a 3D-printing process for molten volcanic stone. It belongs to the Dysgraphia series, in which the machine’s printing code is digitally altered and it gradually forgets how to build a perfect cylinder. This forgetfulness amplifies the expression of the production process. It’s a method for creating pieces that would otherwise be impossible to execute in stone, opening up applications that would normally only belong to other materials.

Just like the error with the slippers revealed a new possibility, the mistakes produced by the printer create pieces that were previously impossible to imagine. In spite of the technology involved, the new is intrinsically human.

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6 MOS Architects We are a small architecture office based in Harlem, New York City. It is closed for now. Some of us are out in the streets protesting; some are with friends and/or family; some are taking care of themselves. We are remote.

Things are busy.

We never followed the ups and downs of the market, and we never did commercial developments. It wasn’t intentional; it just hasn’t happened. So when everything came to a halt, we remained working through chats and video calls. And now, we’re tired of our screens.

We miss making models. We miss office conversations and speculations on what could be. Everything takes a bit longer. We are isolated.

But alone, we can sit with our work and quietly reevaluate it, get to know it again. We can see what we would do differently if given the opportunity, and think about the way forward.

(Image by Michael Vahrenwald.)

7 Humberto Campana Our Campana Brothers: 35 Revolutions exhibition opened at Mam Rio in March, but closed two days later after a year of really hard work. Aside from the devastating loss of life experienced during the pandemic, Brazil has had to deal with an irresponsible government that doesn’t respect democracy, our people, or our environment. It’s horrifying, and has torn me apart, so I’ve been looking for a more positive outlook. I wake up every morning, clean the house, run with my dog in my garden, and water the plants. My home has become my universe, and somehow the scale of the space around me has changed. I no longer feel the urge to be outdoors. My belongings have become my playground, and I have started to make collages and assemblages of objects as an exercise to rebuild myself with my own hands, which has been my mantra since the start of my career. Despite everything that is happening, it stills rings true.

Fernando Campana Since the quarantine began, I’ve been 3,000km away from São Paulo in the coastal city of Fortaleza, northeast Brazil. I’ve been spending time with my older brother José Alberto and his family, occupying myself by sketching, making collages and taking walks on the beach. I used to collect the debris left behind by beachgoers, but there seems to be little to clean these days: wildlife is reclaiming its spaces. When I can, I’ve been visiting the city by car to appreciate the deserted architecture, which has made me think that future construction projects may be more conscious and less invasive in their use of natural resources. I miss my house, but I also feel lucky for having had the time to explore my surroundings and the beautiful nature of Fortaleza.

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8 Rahul Mehrotra Covid-19 has introduced a new meaning and appreciation for both the home and the world.

For those of us fortunate enough to have them, our homes have assumed a new sense of emotional value. Our right to dwell safely means more than it ever did. The power of convening and being convened in our new reality of self-imposed isolation is mind-boggling. It has become a largely virtual world in which we engage with others. In this world, the simultaneity of proximity and distance is collapsing. It makes the home and world one, yet somehow they are much more distant.

At the same time, our locality seems like a new discovery. Why were we so blasé in appreciating the immediate and the local prior to the pandemic?

Perhaps that which was close, and which we had assumed to be constant, felt transient as we made full use of global connectivity and mobility?

Now that the global experience is virtual, this has reversed – our immediate surroundings have become stable and omnipresent. In this moment, the local may give our lives new meaning and a sense of rootedness and identity if we can learn to appreciate the value of the home.

Similarly, by the absence of physical access to the world we will perhaps attach greater appreciation to global connectivity – making us value the place of our home more meaningfully in the world.

(My photograph shows the empty GUND Hall at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University – my mind wanders these empty spaces every day.)

9 Samuel Ross, A-COLD-WALL* In the midst of the global civil rights movement and pandemic, essentialism has been a central theme for my work throughout this period – a time that the 21st century will surely not forget.

By unfortunate circumstance, we have been allotted a period of fixed time to reconsider both our immediate personal values, and the values of society as a whole. For me, it’s been a time focused on process, research, and forming a new intent in regards to what I put out in the world.

In some ways, essentialism has become a fixation. It has taken the form of a short artistic film, satirical animations, and what I have dubbed “Neo-West African” furniture made from OSB. Outside of that which is more personal, obscure and introspective, essentialism has also manifested itself as grass-roots philanthropy and direct action. I have created a number of grants and resources for start-ups led by people of colour, split across a multitude of industries, including tech, agriculture and industrial design.

We are now experiencing times of change.

Being part of that change feels equally tangible and intangible.

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10 Maria Jeglinska-Adamczewska I moved my office to the dining table on 12 March, where it has since stayed for more than two and a half months.

I chose the minimum I needed to function properly from home: a few books, my scanner, my black Enzo Mari box filled with colouring pencils, and one sketchbook. This equipment meant going back to basics – essentially, drawing.

The lockdown has been a time of rediscovering what “home” means. Pre-pandemic, the home was a place of passage – you leave in the morning and come back in the evening – so it’s been interesting to observe how people actually function in that space. Everyone seems to have been searching for basic, tangible activities that can give a sense of time, purpose and satisfaction.

I have drawn endlessly. I let my mind wander through the pages, often repeating the same shape over and over again. It’s something I haven’t done on this scale for a very long time.

In my memory, these past weeks all blend into one day: wake up; have breakfast; sometimes leave home for a quick walk in the morning; sometimes do the same in the evening so as to open and close my “working day”. But flicking back through my sketchbook, I can differentiate between the days; I remember what was going on at any given scribble.

11 Clara von Zweigbergk All forms of handcraft have a calming effect on me. They let my thoughts wander freely and give me a sense of doing something real. They provide a physical proof of having accomplished something with my day.

It doesn’t matter if what results is a useful object or not. In fact, it usually isn’t.

Creating these small paper compositions was a part of my lockdown routine. Throughout this period, my days usually began by setting up the kids with their schoolwork. The moments of silence that followed allowed me to fold paper.

Starting with variants of four basic geometries all cut to the same length – a rhombus, half circle, square and triangle – I was free to play around with endless compositions of shapes and colours.

Maybe you could call these pieces meditative compositions – on reflection, their purpose was to brighten my days at home. I guess the drive to create something propelled me, and many others, to focus on what could motivate and inspire despite these surreal times.

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12 Space Popular When it became clear that our niece would have to celebrate her sixth birthday away from friends and extended family during Spain’s strict lockdown, we realised that singing happy birthday on a video call just wasn’t gonna cut it.

Phone calls, texts, emails, and even video calls reduce human interaction to an often abstract and alienating form for children.

For a six-year-old whose screen-time still does not exceed the odd voice message from grandma, connections are largely made in physical space.

Body language and relative position to one another form an important part of this.

In our work over the past five years, we have speculated on a technological future of remote togetherness where the body is represented in digitally augmented environments. We quickly realised that this was no time for speculation, but rather action. We decided to build a virtual space for our niece in the form of a treasure hunt, where the entire family could come together through avatars specially created for everyone.

After some waffling around with our strange new bodies, the birthday girl and her brother set out to find the clues leading to the treasure, seeing family members along the way. Since then, we have been meeting regularly in different worlds, trying to fulfil their ever more demanding and baffling requests for new worlds. Lately, we have resorted to letting them create their own with some assistance.

We will only know much later, and with much uncertainty, how the pandemic has and is affecting children. It will likely define a generation who came into consciousness during the most uncertain and confusing time in decades. We hope that our presence, even if only virtual, helped our niece and nephew make things a little more familiar and manageable.

13 Fabien Cappello Throughout the pandemic I have been living in Guadalajara, where I have become fascinated by two of the city’s buildings. Both are examples of public infrastructures that are sadly underused by the community, but which nevertheless represent an interesting starting point for re-thinking the public spaces we share.

One of these spaces is a market in El Retiro, an area in the centre of Guadalajara that is famous for its profusion of small makers and workshops – a resource that is often overlooked when it comes to the making of a city. The other is a recently refurbished space in the Parque Morelos, where elderly dancers gather on the weekends under the shade of its canopy. Both structures are largely defined by their roofs and have few walls.

The climate in Guadalajara allows for open spaces like this, which should also mean that there is an opportunity to build cities with fewer physical barriers – spaces that can support different activities and which allow for different users to live together. The absence of walls in both buildings is also an asset when it comes to limiting the spread of viruses. What would happen if more public spaces were built in this way?

We now know that the shape of public space has to change. It is a debate that has accelerated throughout the coronavirus pandemic and the recent Black Lives Matter protests – as it stands, much of our public space is the manifestation of social inequity.

In response, we need more culturally diverse spaces, whose openness embraces inclusion and whose public programme embodies a world with equal opportunities for all. We need to generate accessible spaces for culture and learning.

We need to develop a new aesthetic, free from colonial references and which is instead based on popular knowledge and know-how. It has to be an aesthetic that values its locality, and which does not aspire to mean or represent anything other than joy, beauty and belonging to a place.

We need to take down walls and the rules that go with them.

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14 Fala A series of mild adjustments. Becoming fluent in online lectures, client meetings and teaching. Going back to competitions.

Construction site visits with masks and no touching. Fewer projects, phone calls, and people at the office. More time to refine drawings, invent new ones, write longer texts, and indulge in books and references. Endless explorations and excessive self-reflection.

Columns are still columns, even if they don’t touch floors or ceilings. Houses are still houses, even if we hate spending too much time in them.

In our case, architecture hasn’t failed to provide means and meanings at this moment of distorted living. We keep coming back to it every day, sneaking into the office to keep the discussion going and the “production” machine running.

There has been a familiar combination of desperate ambition, passion, and peculiar jokes.

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15 Bethan Laura Wood During lockdown we were allowed just one walk a day, and it was during these daily sessions that I was reminded of walks I took during my studies at the Royal College of Art (RCA) to learn about and observe the city.

With London’s landscape so drastically changed since then, it was interesting to re-visit projects I designed for “that city”, in relation to the city it became during lockdown or what it might become after.

Coming across a fenced-off playground made me think about a project that was influenced by the streets around Kensington. One thing that struck me in that neighbourhood was the number of private squares that were only accessible with a key. People like me, those without a key, could only peer through these parks’ decorative – but still quite aggressive – wrought-iron fences.

So I came up with a design whereby these publicly visible private parks could be enjoyed even if you remained stuck outside – a series of bird feeders in the shape of Victorian birdcages. That idea struck a chord with me again during lockdown, when so much was closed-off and inaccessible.

How do you make something that is closed-off an inclusive experience for the passer-by?

My sketchbooks from the RCA were all small, less than A5 in size, but the sketchbooks for this project were a little larger. Instead of sketches, however, I had created pop-up landscapes. That’s how far that bird feeder project went – I never created a prototype; I never made anything more than that pop-up version. I can’t help but feel that it would have been nice if I had spot-welded a concept of the idea.

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THE MASK GENERATION

Words by Nanjala Nyabola In June 2020, the World Health Organisation (WHO) quietly changed its advice on masks for the general public. “[To] prevent COVID-19 transmission effectively in areas of community transmission,” the WHO’s new guidance read, “governments should encourage the general public to wear masks”.

Prior to this, the organisation had maintained that masks were unnecessary, even unhelpful, for the general public because they did not effectively protect the user from coronavirus.

The WHO argued that because ordinary people were not properly trained in wearing surgical or N95 masks, the risks of cross-contamination were high. People could mishandle the masks when wearing or taking them off, and then rub germs into their skin; they could remove them to take a call and put them back on improperly.

The WHO was also concerned that masks would lead to a false sense of security in the wearer, who might then stop being vigilant about other precautions – like washing their hands or avoiding close contact with others. More importantly, the WHO argued that high demand for masks was leading to a shortage for frontline health workers around the world. Just wash your hands and socially distance, it advised.

Yet by the time the WHO issued its revised advisory on 5 June, masks were everywhere.

Residents of Asian countries such as South Korea and Taiwan, who have historically navigated outbreaks of respiratory illnesses including SARS and MERS, almost instinctively put on masks despite the WHO advice. In countries like Kenya, where I’m based, masks became mandatory in public spaces, with significant fines and even arrest for those found without

one. In the US, the mask has become embroiled in the country’s embedded politics of absolute, unfettered freedom and the importance of community participation for making public health interventions work: some states and businesses have made them mandatory, some users have refused them as a violation of their personal freedom. Given a choice between liberty or death, some in the US have seemed to ask, “Why not both?”

The mask is the most definitive marker of the break between the world before Covid-19 and the world after it. Its physicality is a raw symbol that something important has fractured, and its ubiquity a reminder that there is no going back anytime soon. Before January 2020, the average person would be hard-pressed to distinguish between an N95 mask and a surgical mask; now we have all become entry-level experts, not just in the differences in design, but in the global supply system too. There are those who are religious about wearing and keeping their masks on, and those who appear to use them to protect their chins or foreheads, rather than noses and mouths.

There are mask-truthers and mask-deniers: those who believe the official guidance and those who think it is an overreaction to “just another flu”. The mask and the debate around it have become the unofficial mascot and theme song of 2020.

As one of the people who followed the WHO guidelines closely, I feel a certain sense of betrayal, both in the way that the organisation backtracked on its initial guidance, as well as in the realisation that its advice was not grounded entirely in science. Since January 2020, a number of studies around the world have confirmed the opposite of what the WHO initially told us: masks work, and they work well, and we are all safer from the spread of the pandemic if more of us wear them. In April 2020, The Lancet directly contradicted the WHO guidance and affirmed that masks do work, providing “a useful and low-cost adjunct to social distancing and hand hygiene during the COVID-19 pandemic”. Subsequent research has shown that not only do surgical and N95 masks work, but so too do the cloth masks which many societies have been making as shortages of clinical masks bite. “Your cloth face covering may protect them,” reads the caption on an advisory illustration created by the US’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). “Their cloth face covering may protect you.”

All masks are not created equal, and since they have become essential around the world, there has been a proliferation of styles and designs. Covid-19 is a virus that carries in droplets – in saliva or snot, but also in the fine moisture that all people project when they speak or sing. The point of the mask is to stop these droplets from landing on other people’s skin, or on surfaces where the virus can live for an extended period of time. From a design perspective, the safest mask is the N95, which has a close facial fit and provides fine filtration of particles by forming a seal around the mouth.

These are the single-use masks that surgeons may wear, but you may have also seen them on construction sites where they stop workers from inhaling fine powders in toxic amounts.

Next step down in effectiveness are surgical masks, which are looser fitting and held behind the ears using elastic bands. These masks are also single-use, and have varying thicknesses depending on the context of the medical procedure they are supposed to be used in.

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Some other cloth masks may look like surgical masks, but they aren’t – while they stop large droplets, they do not filter the finer particles whose spread can contaminate a surgical setting.

They cannot protect you from airborne diseases, but they can prevent you from touching your face if your hands are contaminated, or from coughing out contaminated droplets if you yourself are ill.

It is this ambiguity surrounding the usefulness of cloth masks that the WHO was trying to navigate.

Many of the cloth masks available for public sale are made from cotton fabrics, which have large spaces between their individual fibres. This is precisely what makes cotton so desirable – it breathes. Unlike the surgical or N95 masks which can be unpleasant to wear, even for medical professionals familiar with their use, the breathability of cotton reduces the likelihood that people will take these masks off or interfere with them just because they are uncomfortable.

But they don’t form the seal around the nose and mouth that an N95 does, and they don’t filter finer particles like a high-quality surgical mask would.

Cloth is far from perfect, then, but it does offer some form of protection. The CDC notes that while a simple two-ply cotton mask “may not protect the wearer” from being contaminated, it “may keep the wearer from spreading the virus to others”. Considering that a significant number of those with coronavirus display no symptoms, these masks can, then, help to slow the spread of the disease. Adding a filter between those two layers of cotton – like a piece of tissue paper or a kitchen towel – makes the mask even more effective in unpredictable situations where the wearer may be inadvertently exposed, like in a line at the bank.

In Kenya, like in many other African countries, tailors and designers have been experimenting with open-source designs for making cloth masks safer during this pandemic. By the time the Kenyan government declared a national lockdown in early April, designers coordinated by the Kenya Fashion Council and the Kenya Tailor’s Association were already refining open-source mask designs.

Mechanical and electronic sewing machines whirred to life across the country, as scrap material and bolts of otherwise unusable fabric were turned into something meaningful.

The speed at which it happened was breathtaking – as early as 23 March, the social entrepreneur Florence Kamaitha had sets of three masks available for sale through Twitter at US$5 each.

While the government was still negotiating with export processing zones over the technicalities of shifting production to surgical masks, tailors were already shipping product within their communities. On 4 April, the Kenyan government made masks mandatory in public spaces and by the middle of the following week I was holding my own handmade, two-ply mask with a slot in the middle for a filter – a design from Ann McCreath and the team at Nairobi-based fashion brand KikoRomeo.

By the end of April, major fashion designers across the country were making masks of all sorts as an extension of their previous business models: canvas masks from luggage designer Sandstorm, and dainty lace and silk affairs from bridal atelier Ogake Mosomi. Nor were they simply functional. Most are made from the highly popular kitenge fabric, and masks in Nairobi have become an extension of the wearer’s fashion sensibilities. Some designers are making masks and headwraps or bags as paired sets, with Vivo Activewear offering a matching mask for the dresses in its current collection. Lifestyle

brand Peperuka has emblazoned its mask with “wacha hii korona iishe” meaning “let this corona pass” – a sly dig at the excuse that some Nairobians are using to postpone all kinds of obligations during this period. For fashion conscious Nairobians, the mask has become a statement.

More importantly, across Kenya’s informal settlements tailors have pivoted quickly to not only make these masks, but also to distribute them for free to their neighbours in tightly packed houses where social distancing is impossible.

Fashion designer David Avidu was featured on NTV as one of the earliest pioneers of this practice, but community benefit organisations such as African Masks and SHOFCO have also incorporated mask distribution into their work.

KikoRomeo, for instance, is running a programme where the profit from each mask sold is ploughed back into a pool that pays for “raw materials and[…] labour”, allowing tailors to sew and distribute free masks to members of their communities, while still keeping their businesses afloat.

This response is partly prompted by the government’s decision to make not wearing a mask a criminal, rather than a civil, offence.

Kenya has a long history of police brutality and violence against residents of informal settlements; tailors and community groups feared that if they did not make masks available quickly, the police would disproportionately punish residents of informal settlements with arrest, detention and even extra-judicial execution. Their fears were born out soon after the laws were announced: by 2 June, the police had killed 15 people across the country while enforcing the lockdown and curfew, most of whom lived in informal settlements. Activist Boniface Mwangi documented on camera police violently rounding up young men in Nairobi’s Korogocho settlement for wearing their masks improperly (under the chin, rather than on the face and nose), even though the plain-clothes officers were also not wearing their masks properly.

In Kenya, like in other societies, mask usage is contoured by underlying dynamics that preceded the pandemic. While there was public resistance to the criminalisation of mask wearing, there was no objection to mask-wearing per se, in part because we are a society that has survived other widespread disease outbreaks and we have adapted our behaviour accordingly.

For African millennials like myself, part of the 75 per cent of Kenya’s population who are below the age of 35, our defining generational marker is not avocado toast or home ownership; we are the HIV/AIDS generation, which de-stigmatised and adapted to the omnipresence of the disease.

We are the generation who had to forget that sex without condoms was ever an option, even sometimes with the person you are married to. We are the generation who had to become comfortable with people coming into our classrooms with wooden penises to demonstrate condom use, or who saw the purple and yellow signs for “Voluntary Counselling and Testing for HIV/AIDS” proliferate on every street corner in our hometowns. Once you have reorganised your whole life around the threat and presence of HIV/AIDS, putting on a mask is not something worth fighting over.

Moreover, the rapid uptake of reusable masks in Kenya compared to countries such as the UK and US can be directly connected to the culture of reuse and recycling present within the society.

Certainly, Kenya has a trash problem – according

to the African Population Health Research Centre, for example, Nairobi generates around 3,000 tonnes of solid waste each day, of which only half is collected. But if you go beyond the structural challenges of municipal waste management, you will find that poor people and poor countries are the best at reusing and recycling materials – wasting things is an expensive habit that few can afford. Kenya’s textile industry has struggled because of the popularity of mitumba – secondhand clothing dumped in Africa from Western countries – but tailors are a dime a dozen owing to the demand for bespoke clothing for special occasions and a culture of repairing damaged clothing rather than throwing it away. Kenya’s environmental street cred is solid, and has made the pivot to reusable masks organic. In August 2017, the government announced a nationwide ban on plastic bags, fuelling demand for reusable tote bags and baskets, including those made from cotton. For bag designers such as Vintara Collections, the pivot from creating cotton totes to producing cotton masks has been a relatively natural one.

None of this is to say that there is 100 per cent compliance with mask wearing. The visual messaging by the state on the seriousness of Covid-19 has done a lot of damage to public consciousness about how dangerous the disease is. By persistently failing to wear masks in their own meetings and press conferences, government officials have sent mixed messages, enabling some civilians to continue to perch their masks precariously on their foreheads or under their chins, at least until they spot a police van.

As hinted by what Mwangi found in Korogocho, even the police are rarely seen wearing masks while out arresting people for not wearing masks. The class dynamics of who gets away with a warning for breaking regulations on masks and who spends the weekend in jail, or even dies, are stark and depressing.

But at the very least, the creativity and Kenyan twist that the country’s designers have put on masks mean that people have accepted them with less resistance. We didn’t waste time arguing about wearing them, and this may be one of the tools that gives poor societies like ours some hope of navigating this new Covid-19 reality.

If masks are the new normal, at the very least Kenyans are braced for impact.

Nanjala Nyabola is a Nairobi-based writer, humanitarian advocate and political analyst.

24

ZOONOTIC SPACES

Words by Oli Stratford The invasion is over, Earth’s defenders vaporised by the Martian tripods. It hadn’t made for much of a fight. “It never was a war, any more than there’s war between man and ants,” laments one routed artillerymen, now living feral on Putney Heath. Humanity, he warns, is destined to become chattel. “Nice roomy cages, fattening food, careful breeding, no worry.” The Martians will chivvy the survivors from their bolt holes.

They will farm them.

H.G. Wells’s 1898 book The War of the Worlds is a tale of conflicting ecosystems feeding upon one another. “Let it suffice to say,” explains Wells of Martian nourishment, “[that] blood obtained from a still living animal, in most cases from a human being, was run directly by means of a little pipette into the recipient canal.”

The artilleryman’s fatalism comes close to the story’s climax when, mad with trauma, Wells’s narrator approaches the Martian army seeking self-destruction. Instead, he makes a startling discovery. The Martians are dead, reduced to “lank shreds of brown, at which the hungry birds pecked and tore[…] overtaken by a death that must have seemed to them as incomprehensible as any death could be.”

It’s a moment of grizzled earthiness amidst the sci-fi. In its attack upon the alien planet, the Martian army has been exposed to pathogens to which it holds no defences. The Martians have underestimated the complexity of the ecosystem they sought to conquer, failing to realise that their actions have opened a war on two fronts.

While humans could make little headway against the sophisticated war machines of the Martians, those invisible “transient creatures [which] swarm and multiply in a drop of water” decimate

the invaders. The Martians are rotted out by the planet’s microbial subworld, and their survivors forced to retreat: “As we besiege them, as we corner them, as we exterminate them and eat them, we’re getting their diseases.”

Ah, except the Martians don’t speak in The War of the Worlds, so that quote was finagled somewhat. It’s actually from Spillover, a 2012 non-fiction book by science writer David Quammen that documents zoonoses, or animal infections which are transmissible to humans.

They’re more common than you might think.

“Show me a strange new disease,” says Quammen, “and, most likely, I can show you a zoonosis.” According to ‘Host Range and Emerging and Reemerging’, a 2005 University of Edinburgh epidemiological paper, 58 per cent of the 1,407 recognised human pathogens are zoonotic. If you restrict matters to emerging human diseases, those whose incidence is increasing after their initial introduction, three quarters are zoonotic. Ebola is zoonotic, as are West Nile, plague, malaria and the influenzas.

Machupo, Marburg, Lassa and SARS are zoonotic, and so too are dengue fever, rabies, Hendra and HIV. SARS-CoV-2, our current coronavirus, is also zoonotic. It likely passed to humans from bats, potentially travelling through pangolins along the way.

Zoonosis, Quammen notes, is “a word of the future, destined for heavy use in the twenty-first century.” So far he seems correct.

Epidemics occurred frequently throughout the second half of the 20th century and, since 2000, an accelerating number of zoonotic incidents has shown little sign of abating: SARS (2003), swine flu (2009), MERS (2012), Ebola (2013-16, 2018), Zika (2015-16) and Nipah (2018), to name just a few. One reason for this is straightforward.

Zoonoses spill into the population when humans come into contact with other species. There are currently 7.8 billion humans on Earth, while as recently as 1927 there were just 2 billion, so increased contact is almost certainly inevitable.

This increase, however, should be coupled to a corresponding rise in the numbers of domestic animals that support this human population.

“There are now more than one billion cattle, one billion pigs, and over twenty billion chickens living on our planet,” writes virologist Nathan Wolfe in his 2011 book The Viral Storm. “There are estimated to be more domestic animals alive today than in all the past ten thousand years of domestication through 1960 combined.”

While many microbes originating in these domesticated animals may have long since entered into humans, this doesn’t preclude them from operating as vectors for new diseases contracted from wild species they come into contact with. “When we’re increasing agricultural intensification and livestock densities,” explains Kate Jones, chair of Ecology and Biodiversity at University College London, speaking on The Guardian’s Science Weekly podcast, “they’re also encountering wildlife pathogens.”

Nipah, for instance, is a virus originating in fruit bats. In 1998, it began circulating among Malaysia’s 2.35m domestic pigs, likely as a result of contaminated fruits dropping into piggeries before passing on into humans. By the time the epidemic was brought under control, 109 people had died, with a case fatality rate of close to 40 percent – the virus triggering encephalitis and other serious neurological damage. Although the disease originated in wild animals, it was spread and amplified by commercial farms.

The first sign that nipah had reached a new

area was the sound emerging from animals held in the piggeries. “It became known as a one-mile barking cough,” bat zoonosis expert Hume Field told Australia’s 60 Minutes, “because you could hear it a mile away.”

More people for wildlife to come into contact with and more domestic animals to ease passage along the way. “If you look at the world from the point of view of a hungry virus,” historian William H. McNeill argued in his 1976 book Plagues and People “[…] we offer a magnificent feeding ground with all our billions of human bodies”. McNeill’s conception of the body as a feeding ground is apt, not least because the issue is exacerbated by its spatial element. Growing contact between disparate species is not simply a matter of increased bodies, but of a decrease in discrete environments too. The rapid erosion of natural habitats has seen forests razed, wetlands drained and wilderness cleared, driving wildlife into closer proximity with the urban and agricultural environments raised in their stead. We are not only abundant, but intrusive. Meanwhile, global transportation systems have forged disparate places into single environments, enabling the rapid mass transit of people, goods and animals across vast distances. “We no longer live on a planet where pockets of life persist for centuries without contact with others,” writes Wolfe.

“We now live on a microbially unified planet.

For better or worse, it’s one world.”

One factor worth considering in relation to this, at least in cases where other species have been purposefully brought into human environments, is an eroded distinction between goods and animals – a form of objectification played out in commercial contexts. This is not necessarily a question of animal products such as meat or milk, but a concern over the animals themselves. One recurrent hypothesis as to the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, for instance, is that SARS-CoV-2 spilled over into humans at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market.

Based in Wuhan, the Huanan wet market primarily trades in fish and shellfish, but is reported to have supplemented this with a smaller number of stalls selling live and slaughtered wildlife such as beavers, porcupines and snakes.

Determination of whether the Huanan market was the site of the SARS-CoV-2 spillover will take time, but what is not up for dispute is the fact that markets trading in wildlife the world over represent hospitable sites for possible microbial transmission.1 Writing in her 2017 study The Extinction Market, researcher and analyst Vanda FelbabBrown characterised the wildlife trade as partially driven by a mindset in which “wild animals and plants are seen through the prism of their utilization as sources of income, food and prestige.” The fact that animals are sentient beings is either not recognised, or else outweighed by the importance attached to their value as a resource. There are socioeconomic reasons for this framework that demand investigation and redress, not least the pressures (and exploitation) of rural poverty, but it has undeniably fostered a number of spaces and systems in which wildlife is cultivated as a species of goods to be stocked and traded.

This is no small trade. According to a 2018 study by wildlife NGO TRAFFIC, around 1.3m protected wild animals and plants, 1.5m skins, and 2,000 tonnes of meat, were legally exported from Africa to Asia between 2006 and 2015. These figures, however, only pertain to animals that fall under the multilateral CITES wildlife treaty.

Lockdown Paper

“The volume of international trade in animals not categorized by CITES is about ten times greater than the trade in listed ones[…] while the domestic trade is ten times greater than that,” explains journalist Rachel Love Nuwer in her 2018 book Poached: Inside the Dark World of Wildlife Trafficking. And recall that these figures only apply to legal, or nominally legal, exports.

In 2004, a team of researchers based in Hong Kong produced ‘Wild Animal Trade Monitoring at Selected Markets in Guangzhou and Shenzhen, South China, 2000–2003’, a study of conditions observed in its subject markets.2 “The animals are packed in tiny spaces and often in close contact with other wild and/or domesticated animals such as dogs and cats,” the authors wrote, adding that the stacked wire cages used to house the animals allowed excrement and urine to rain down through the shelves. “Many are either sick or with open wounds and without basic care.

Animals are often slaughtered inside the markets in several stalls specialising in this.” This style of densely-stocked retail works well for many products the world over – from dry goods to electricals, textiles to hardware – but there are clear questions over whether it should be applied to live animals, or whether such creatures should be shoehorned into the category of products to begin with. Even ignoring the obvious ethical issues, this setup raises rudimentary problems of retail design that have clear implications for public health.

Conventional products stacked on a shelf are static, hermetic units. They don’t salivate, cough, defecate, urinate, bleed or ooze; they aren’t resolved into a slick of meat, blood and viscera at the point of sale. An obvious difference, but not one addressed by the retail model.

Given the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from the Huanan market, as well as evidence to suggest that 2003’s SARS epidemic may have spread from masked palm civets sold in Guangdong, perhaps it’s a model that simply isn’t well suited to the sale of animals? If nothing else, caging myriad species in the close proximity demanded by dense retail settings, installed amidst urban populations of millions, presents an obvious problem for epidemiology. “A virus that gets out here,” notes Wolfe, “has definitely won the microbial lottery.” For the record, I don’t believe that pangolins or palm civets should be sold, period. I accept the ethical arguments against cultural reasons for their consumption, while any necessity for their capture and sale as a result of poverty is a condemnation of the inequalities in the system that allowed things to reach that stage to begin with. But if they are to be sold, then the mode of that sale needs to engage with epidemiological realities – for the safety of those involved if nothing else.

Not that wildlife markets are alone in treating animals as products – they’re probably not even the worst offenders. The exact same view is rooted in industrial livestock production, as evinced by the historian Sigfried Giedion in his 1948 book Mechanization Takes Command, in which he explains that industrial pig farming sees itself as being essentially concerned with “a complex, irregularly shaped object: the hog.”

Pigs and their ilk are clearly best-sellers. In 2017, roughly 2bn live hogs, chickens, cattle, sheep and goats were shipped around the world, and it is worth noting that these are not heirloom breeds with the kind of genetic variety across populations that might act as a firebreak in the case of spreading disease. These are animals as product, designed and bred to meet the needs

of an industrial agriculture that has traded small herds for the scale achievable through corporate production lines that span the world.

Consider poultry. “[Industrial chickens] are as much commodities as they are birds,” argues the evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace in his 2016 book Big Farms Make Big Flu. “As much engineering problems as living organisms[…] [they are bred for] for what the market and the industrial filière demand – big breasts in six weeks tops”. It is an efficient system judged according to its own limited production goals, but comes with severe epidemiological costs.

Given that industrial herds and flocks represent carefully designed products rather than naturally variegated populations, they “are unable to evolve in response” to any new pathogen they might encounter. The poultry flocks of industrial agriculture are artificial, immuno-compromised ecologies that could “never persist in nature because of the disease costs they incur”, but whose artificial design in mitigation of this natural impossibility “[allows] more poultry to be processed faster.” This model may enjoy success when applied to industrial objects, but it does nothing to acknowledge that rapid, large-volume production is a narrow, ill-fitting design brief to apply to animal species.

The problem hides in plain sight in Giedion’s original wording: whether you feel that they can play the role of commodities or not, isn’t it odd to think of animals as objects?

This isn’t simply a matter of semantics.

The 2009 swine flu pandemic, for instance, was caused by the H1N1 virus, which researchers at Columbia University later determined to be related to strains first isolated in US pig factory farms in 1998. These viruses subsequently circulated amongst the country’s large and mobile hog stocks – a process which Science termed “an evolutionary fast track” for the virus – before hybridising with strains isolated in Europe and Asia to produce the zoonosis H1N1.

It is, Wallace argues, a story that highlights “swine flu” as an essentially misleading name. “[Pigs] have very little to do with how influenza emerges,” he states, instead laying the blame for H1N1 upon industrial systems that cast animals as designed objects. “They didn’t organize themselves into cities of thousands of immuno-compromised pigs. They didn’t artificially select out the genetic variation that could have helped reduce the transmission rates[…] They don’t ship themselves thousands of miles by truck, train, or air. Pigs do not naturally fly. The onus must be placed on the decisions we humans made to organize them this way.”

Zoonotic epidemics are not simply things that happen to us – they’re reflections of our actions on the environment and corollaries of the systems that we have designed around animal life. If we would like to reduce their future likelihood, those systems require amendment.

In terms of epidemiology, not a bad place to start would be to consider the “worldview” of a pathogen, which frames the divide between human and other animal bodies in a radically different manner to the consumer/product relationship described above. “[Taxonomic] barriers that we place on species are constructs of our own scientific systems, not nature,” explains Wolfe. “If two different hosts share sufficiently similar bodies and immune systems, the bug will move between them irrespective of how a museum curator would separate them.”

In other words, if The War of the Worlds were concerned with scientific accuracy, its pathogens

would not pass into the Martians as some kind of heroic Earth resistance (as Wells’s honorific “our microscopic allies” may suggest), but only because Martian biology is sufficiently similar to that of terrestrial species to make spillover viable. To a microbe, there is no meaningful difference between wildlife, farmed life, industrially designed life and human life – all are of a piece provided that their bodies serve as sites for reproduction.

This notion of bodies as environments, however, goes missing when we conceive of animals as goods to be handled as we might any other. Whether through wildlife markets’ transportation of myriad species into a dense commercial setting, or industrial agriculture’s subjection of animal bodies to the meat grinder of Taylorism and its successors (a process that, both conceptually and literally, is designed to erase the difference between an animal body and meat), these spaces do little to acknowledge the similarity of humans and other animals as living beings, and the shared biological susceptibilities that result from this. “Even when dead, the hog largely refuses to submit to the machine,” said Giedion of the challenges of completely automatising the slaughter process to deal with the physical awkwardness of its “object”. It’s not what Giedion meant, but perhaps this should be taken as a sign that bodies simply aren’t good candidates for mass industrialisation and commodification?

Alongside their spatial complexity, animals have an epidemiological complexity too.

Dare I suggest that there might also be an ethical complexity? The world may need to eat, but that’s not the same thing as agreeing that animal bodies are meet for commodification.

In taking aim at agribusiness’s treatment of livestock, Wallace asks whether “the resulting profits [are] defensible at such a rapidly accruing [epidemiological] cost?” In some respects, this is a question for design. Certainly, there is a design problem: the spaces in which we come into contact with animals need to be reimagined urgently, and in such a way as to properly grapple with the realities of the bodies which they contain. Thankfully, there is plenty of literature out there as to how we might go about achieving this. “[A] zoonosis may spill over more readily within a disrupted, fragmented ecosystem than within an intact, diverse ecosystem,” notes Quamman, suggesting that many of the methods being discussed to protect environments threatened by climate collapse would be epidemiologically helpful too. Similarly, Wallace sets out some initial ideas for a more socially equitable form of “locale-specific” agriculture that may curb agribusiness without slipping into prelapsarian fantasy, ensuring that spaces are “flexibly tailored to each region’s physical, social, and epidemiological landscapes on the ground, interconnecting ecology and economy.” This would need considerable elaboration and reflection before it could serve as a useful blueprint, but at least it’s an idea which acknowledges there are factors worth considering beyond scale of production. There would be much work to do, then, but it would be surprising if architects and designers were unable to offer some modest improvements on our present systems and spaces.

Conversely, in real-world conditions not all design problems admit of design solutions.

The discipline can play a small role in shaping its own briefs and selecting the criteria to which it responds, but much of the vital work falls 26

into the realms of politics, economics, and culture, and their capacity to change values surrounding animal life. “CITES, the international treaty that is meant to regulate trade of endangered animals,” notes Love Nuwer in Poached, “includes fewer than 10 percent of known reptiles and 8 percent of known birds in its appendixes.”

Regulations around trafficking, when they exist, are often not enforced; annual global livestock shipments have increased by around 1bn animals since 2007; and habitat clearance by agribusiness continues largely unchecked.

At the time of writing this article, for instance, a joint investigation by The Guardian, Unearthed and The Bureau of Investigative Journalism revealed that HSBC had underwritten close to $2bn worth of bonds over the last six years for three beef companies which have been heavily linked to Amazon deforestation. There seems little prospect of change on the horizon, and this torpor will have epidemiological consequences. As Wells’s Martians almost once said: “As we besiege them, as we corner them, as we exterminate them and eat them, we’re getting their diseases.”

Oli Stratford is the editor-in-chief of Disegno.

1 And it is worth stressing that this is a worldwide problem, driven in no small part by international demand. The United States, for instance, is the second-largest illegal wildlife market after China. Anyone who watched Netflix’s Tiger King during lockdown should have some sense of this problem.

2 One would hope that this paper describes a series of worst-case scenarios that have since improved, but even a significantly cleaned-up market dealing in wildlife would still face many of the issues described.

OP­TI­ MI­SING FOR BRUNCH

Words by Dan Hill The street is the basic unit of city. Buildings appear everywhere, in all contexts, but streets are really, essentially, urban. They are where everything comes together, revealing the sheer complexity of our tangled existence, yet in ways that are entirely everyday and accessible.

The streets are where a city’s dramas play out: whether in the form of the quiet vignettes witnessed over the course of the pandemic as traffic has receded, or the righteously loud protests seen around the world following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

The transformation happening on streets the world over is extraordinary, with the Covid-19 lockdown/slowdown initially forcing the hand of urban politicians, policymakers, and planners, before Black Lives Matter punctuated those spaces with far greater question marks and exclamation points. As the brakes were slammed on in regards to not only traffic, but the entire economy, we have had (or still have) a moment to take stock.

Throughout April and May, municipalities began making rapid adjustments to their streets in a bid to keep public transport devoted to essential workers, while also attempting to resist a swing back towards the private motor car. The phrase “tactical urbanism” somehow made its way into both the Financial Times and Forbes, as politicians announced a series of Covid-centred urban interventions. Berlin began laying down bike lanes in 10 days, a fraction of the time usually taken; Paris announced multiple measures intended to encourage cycling (with the city’s deputy mayor for town planning, Jean-Louis Missika, adding, “Our secret dream is that the temporary becomes permanent”); and New

Zealand’s associate transport minister Julie Anne Genter invited cities to apply for 90 per cent funding to widen pavements. Other street interventions based around removing car traffic, and increasing a diversity of uses, have emerged in Milan, Vancouver, London, Auckland, Seattle, Oakland, and numerous others cities.

Roughly simultaneous to these retrofits, Europe has seen a small craze emerge for using chalk to mark, name, and otherwise describe urban biodiversity – the trees and plants that grow in all streets. It’s a lovely movement, led largely by children and teachers, which stands as an odd echo of the turn-of-the-century “warchalking” craze for marking the presence, and characteristics, of WiFi hotspots. Awkwardly, however, this biodiversity marking is technically illegal in the UK, despite the fact that its coloured chalk will wash away with the next rain shower.

Around a month later, Black Lives Matter began to occupy streets with politics, exemplifying what public space can be about and just how potent the street is. Entire cities are beginning to transform in the most fundamental of ways: from proposals to defund the police in favour of a focus on the spaces and services that may prevent harm in the first place, through to autonomous zones flowering in the cracks in fractured cities like Seattle. Incredibly, on 5 June, 10m-tall yellow letters were painted on 16th Street in Washington, directly north of the White House. Declaring “BLACK LIVES MATTER”, the letters were painted by local activists working with city crews sanctioned by the mayor’s office. This extraordinary symbol spread through social media and was quickly repeated in cities across the USA. Further giant letters appeared, declaring “END RACISM NOW” and “DEFUND THE POLICE”, turning streets into a kind of performative broadcast space – one that exists in the city and Apple Maps simultaneously.

Although with far greater reach, and of much greater import, this political street art can be understood to sit alongside the tiny arrows and scribbles created by children to describe trees and plants. Both marks are political: the former, obviously so, at wonderful and epic scale; the latter more quietly, subtly positioning the street as multi-species environment that can be a site for learning rather than traffic, and a place for children. Both see the street as a place to make a mark; both provide sketches of what the street could be in future; and both provide insights into how carefully we must approach these next transitions.

Our streets are essentially ideological, political and cultural in character. As such, what happens to them next depends on the difference between tactics and strategy: between short-term reaction and the possibility of systemic change. “Tactical” interventions are those based on what economist Milton Friedman termed “the ideas that are lying around”. One definition of the difference between tactics and strategy is that the former are what you do when you know what to do, the latter when you don’t. In relation to urbanism, “strategy” would involve questioning the more fundamental values about what and who streets are for, and about how our choices for built fabric and public space embody what we stand for.

It is about what we do next, and how. Amidst all the noise, we need to find time and space to discuss the way that we should proceed down the street, as we unhook our 20th-century infrastructures from their 20th-century ideologies, and rebuild around 21st-century cultures instead.

In the case of Covid-19, many decisions have been made by the virus itself. As cities went into Lockdown Paper

some form of lockdown or slowdown, streets had to adapt accordingly.1 While these sudden behavioural changes may have dislodged some sedimented mental models, there appears to be little in the way of truly inventive urban work, or more strategic approaches that may stick.

Most of the current proposals from designers seem to simply retain existing urban dynamics, but with a viral overlay. Czech designers Hua Hua have suggested a Gastro Safe Zone kit, comprising tables set within grids of social distancing halos, built to keep people apart in a piazza (running against the very idea of piazza). Parc de la Distance by Austrian studio Precht suggests reshaping a park as a tightly wound maze of dense hedges, with gates preventing crossover with other walkers. These ideas may have an absurdist charm, but they are formal proposals, rather than attempts to grapple with process or politics. Amongst municipalities, only Paris, with the head-start provided by Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s “15-minute city” strategy, may be capable of aligning tactical responses within a strategic framework. This thorough reworking of central Paris as a “Ville du quart d’heure” will create dozens of resilient, green, car-free neighbourhoods within which, as Hidalgo puts it, “Parisians can learn, do sports, have healthcare, shop, within 15 minutes of their home.” Even this transformation, however, will not deal with the broader issues of social justice that lay outside the city’s périphérique administrative limit, but which nevertheless define what Paris is.

The virus will disappear at some point – through collective immunity or vaccine or both – and we will be able to congregate again. The material landscape of police tape, plexiglass, and decals will fade away, sooner in some places than others, and there are many places, from Taipei to Malmö, where it has been barely needed at all. All of this is highly localised, deeply cultural. (There’s a joke circling here in the Nordics, usually aimed at the Finns – including by the Finns – saying that people can’t wait for the 2m social distancing rule to be removed, so they can return to the usual 5m.) Either way, these tactical measures have started to rapidly reclaim the street, at least for the moment, providing a foothold for greater things – even surface moves such as these were largely impossible before the virus. To those of us working in strategic urban design, it has almost been a little sobering. As Nicholas de Monchaux, head of MIT’s architecture department, writes, “While it pains me to say it as an urban designer, we often do not need entirely new ideas to improve our cities. But sometimes, it appears, we need a crisis.”

But why did we need that crisis, and why has apparently rational urbanism failed to reclaim the streets, whereas the virus and protests have done so overnight? The issue perhaps lies in having mischaracterised the work of urbanism, and having seen the street as a technical object to be optimised as if there was no attendant ideology. Right now, we viscerally understand that the street is about politics and culture, driven by ideology, whereas previously we have often acted as we need simply “listen to the science”.

The apparently ideology-free technocratic emphasis on optimisation can be traced back through the last century. Le Corbusier’s 1929 book The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning contains the seeds of this efficiency-driven approach.

There’s a fable in the book that captures Le

Corbusier’s interests, and those more broadly of a technocratic strain of modernism which sees Man (and really, a handful of men) at the centre of all things. “Man walks in a straight line because he has a goal and knows where he is going; he has made up his mind to reach some particular place and he goes straight to it,” writes Le Corbusier. “The pack-donkey meanders along, meditates a little in his scatter-brained and distracted fashion, he zigzags in order to avoid the larger stones, or to ease the climb, or to gain a little shade; he takes the line of least resistance[…] The Pack-Donkey’s Way is responsible for the plan of every continental city.”

Yet “Corb’s way” came to be responsible for the plan of almost every subsequent bit of city building, aligned as it was with the industrial development of the automobile. “[A] modern city lives by the straight line,” spat Corbusier, adding that the curve was “an appalling and paradoxical misconception in an age of motor-cars.” Apparently few readers noticed the implication of Le Corbusier’s subsequent choice of metaphors. The “surgery” he recommended, which would cut “arteries” through the Pack-Donkey’s meandering route in order to allow the city’s “bodily fluids” to flow, would have slowly but inexorably drained the city’s body of its life force.

In the current slowdown, as the waves of traffic recede to reveal the deeper truth that the street is not about cars at all, we may be reminded of the places to which people gravitate given the choice. When we walk along a Barri Gòtic side street, a Melbourne laneway, an alley in Kyoto, a curving colonnade in Torino, or through the medina in Fez, we must now be aware of the value in the Pack-Donkey’s route. These places are not really efficient – or the “sane and noble” orthogonal forms that Le Corbusier extolled – but as freeways begin to fade, which has proven more valuable over the long term? Perhaps “[man] (sic) has made up his mind” that the Pack-Donkey was right all along?

The dynamic of political protests in the street is also slow and haphazard. It may be channeled or kettled by police, but its goal is hardly getting from A to B. In some sense, while political protest’s actual route may have more in common with “donkey urbanism”, as the Pratt Institute’s Catherine Ingraham dubbed it, based on taking “the line of least resistance”, it is clearly about being the line of most resistance. Either way, it articulates a richer idea of streets as not being about traffic. Instead, it is a place to articulate what the late Michael Sorkin, an early loss to coronavirus, described as “the collusion of difference that only cities can produce”.

The resilience of this less efficient but more effective space, and the broader range of value it generates, may change not only our approach to urbanism, but also our set of mental models about many more things. The short-term changes to many of our streets caused by Covid-19 could presage longer-term structural changes that have an impact on our cities more generally.

It is an attempt to move beyond the “urbs” of the city’s form and into the “civitas” of its culture and public life. The line of thinking that runs from Le Corbusier to Y Combinator, via mid-century transport planning, has been largely unbroken until now. In a few short weeks, however, other narratives have emerged – whether chalking biodiversity into the pavement or pulling down statues; stopping traffic to march or to plant gardens; or simply the idea that it is your right to have streets that

enable you to thrive, and which are enjoyable, rewarding, enriching and nurturing. None of these things are efficient, but they are what the city can be about.

Part of what is happening on the streets is a re-positioning of values, combined with a re-patterning of urban form. In both, however, we have to be clearer about the public life in question: whose lives, which public, to what end?

The shift away from cars was already happening and Covid-19 is an accelerant for that, but it is politics that decides how this process ultimately manifests. The way that happens, the values embodied, and what the street becomes, have now become crucial questions. In her essay ‘Coronavirus is not fuel for urbanist fantasies’, Curbed’s Alissa Walker takes down numerous urbanists and designers for their wish-fulfilment fantasies about what they wanted streets to become: “Opening a handful of streets for one type of user doesn’t mean that those streets are open for everyone.” Written before the protests precipitated by George Floyd’s killing, Walker’s article now seems prescient, describing the need to reassess “our broken cities” far more fundamentally than simply painting a bike lane and popping-up a parklet.

A single photograph by Nick Swartsell of Cincinnati CityBeat foregrounded these questions, depicting a group brunching at a parklet in the foreground, while a Black Lives Matter protest marches past in the background.

The prism of a shattered USA means that this image has come to serve as a lightening rod for the fiercest of debates, but it also reinforces the idea that the street is where both these movements – the reclaiming of public space, the reclaiming of public politics – collide in real time and space. They are intrinsically linked.

Walker makes it clear that without a systematic transformation centred on social justice, tactical moves will only reinforce existing power structures.

“Until we can fully engage with the erasure of communities, structural racism, and unequal distribution of wealth that got us here, our cities will not crawl out from under this crisis,” she cautions. In other words, present ideas only optimise for brunch.

Walker’s scathing critique of urbanists fiddling with bike lanes whilst America burns should force a deeper level of participation and ownership in what places are for, in who decides, and what they are about. The outcomes can tend towards bikes, birdsong, and barbecues over time – those are things we can also optimise around – but the way that we get there, what’s at stake and who decides, is far more important. Writing for Citylab, the urbanist Destiny Thomas makes this point too, and forcefully. We must not leap ahead to a built form outcome, even with something so apparently intrinsically “good” as open streets, without first assessing the power structures that build up or tear apart our cities and their people: “Without a plan to include and protect Black, Brown, Indigenous, trans, and disabled people, or a plan to address antiBlack vigilantism and police brutality, these open streets are set up to fail.”

This does not mean that streets should not be open, green, car-free, and with diverse applications. Quite the opposite. But without addressing this context of social transformation, and the way we get there, tactical measures may actually make things worse. We need a far more strategic reappraisal of who owns the street, and who decides what happens there. As I have previously written elsewhere, put traffic planners in charge of the street and you get traffic, just as 28

if you put gardeners in charge of the street, we’d get gardens. But put diverse peoples in charge of the street and perhaps we’d get a street for diverse peoples.

Reflecting on the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone emerging in Seattle, activist and mayoral candidate Nikkita Oliver articulated something akin to the difference between tactics and strategies: “It’s one thing to take a space, it’s another thing to turn a space into something functional that actually serves the community.”

Her phrase, taken out of context, perhaps inadvertently reads like a brief in an urban design project. Our job as designers may be to flip it around and see that urban design actually already exists in that broader political context, and always has done. The street is where it all happens; the question now is how it happens.

Dan Hill is a designer, urbanist and writer, and the director of Strategic Design at Vinnova, the Swedish Government’s innovation agency.

1 See Rory Hyde’s ‘The New Ballet of the Sidewalk’, p7.

COVID CU­RA­ TING

Words Glenn Adamson Covid-19 has been a fast-moving tragedy.

Its speed can be measured in the rapid proliferation not just of the contagion itself, but also previously unfamiliar phrases (had you even heard of “social distancing” a year ago?), design solutions (all that floor-marking tape!), and even ideas, which have passed from revelatory to clichéd in record time.

One of the thoughts that has been making the rounds is a simple one: for all that it has disrupted, the pandemic is also accelerating trends that were already in motion. Most obvious, here, is the migration of real-world content to online platforms, for better or worse. The same can be said for many other trajectories: the shift to cashless transactions; hostility to globalism and a concomitant re-investment in local manufacturing; the sense of generational conflict; and ever-expanding wealth inequality. Museums are typically understood as slow-moving beasts, but they too are experiencing rapid change, with a dramatic shift of emphasis toward digital platforms since physical premises have been forced to close. This has sped up a development that has already been brewing in museums for some time: the convergence of curating and journalism. It may seem a small matter in the grand scheme of things, but it gets to the heart of what is happening in cultural institutions during the age of the coronavirus.

For me, this story begins way back in 2014 when the V&A formally launched its Rapid Response Collecting initiative. Full disclosure: I had worked at the museum until the previous year and had a minor role in developing the idea.

But it was really the work of curators Kieran Long and Corinna Gardner, the latter of whom has

remained the programme’s primary champion following Long’s departure for ArkDes in Sweden.

The objective was in some ways straightforward: deploy the gravitas of the V&A to bring attention to timely issues. The project thrived, bringing to the fore hot-button artefacts like the first 3D-printed gun, or the umbrellas used by Hong Kong protestors to protect themselves from tear gas.

Originally, Rapid Response Collecting took meaning from its exceptional status within the institution: it worked precisely because it was a counterpoint to the V&A’s usual way of doing business. The idea did catch on at a few other places. Several museums acquired Pussyhats as soon as their wearers were done protesting, for example. (I donated mine to the Fuller Craft Museum, at its request.) But it’s only with the onset of Covid-19 that it has become widespread practice, presumably because business-as-usual is out of the question. The situation for most museums has been dire. The staff at the V&A have been relatively lucky; most were sent home until further notice and told to stop working, but at least they kept being paid through the government’s furlough scheme.

Other, smaller museums tipped immediately into existential crisis mode: they began sacking their employees, often starting with the lowestpaid frontline staff. Key functions like exhibitions planning ground almost to a halt. Even the mighty Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has been affected: its acquisition funds have been diverted to help cover operating expenditure.

What’s a curator to do? For many, the answer has been to respond, rapidly. The team at the V&A could not keep collecting very easily, so shifted emphasis to a series of deftly-drawn online case studies, published under the title “Pandemic Objects”. Brendan Cormier, who has led this effort, wrote about the sudden proliferation of handmade signs – from stores’ closing notices to kids’ window rainbows – nicely describing them as an eruption within “the editorial layer” of the city. Ella Kilgallon summoned the melancholy image of planned vacations being replaced by virtual tourism via Google Earth.

Natalie Kane rounded up attempts to redesign the humble door handle, a flashpoint of anxiety in an age of surface-born contagion. Christopher Wilk noted the sudden explosion of bicycling, as commuters avoided crowded public transport and took advantage of safe streets. Disegno’s own Kristina Rapacki wrote a guest post on what it takes to convert an convention centre into an emergency care facility. And Catherine Flood, curator of the recent V&A exhibition Food: Bigger than the Plate, contributed a thoughtful pieceon home baking, which provides at least the aroma of reassurance. And Gus Casely Hayford, new director of V&A East, explored his own dreams as an avenue of imaginative escape: “Tiny fractured micro-moments of memory are drifting back like fragments of old lost photographs, lost from context but still potent with meaning.”

The V&A has by no means been alone in registering the moment. In a remarkable display of agility and fortitude, three other London museums also launched coronavirus response projects. The Museum of the Home (formerly the Geffrye) is documenting domestic life under lockdown through a series of personal accounts: improvised workspaces, improvised haircuts, improvised education, and perpetual cleanup (“the toys have won the battle… will mummy and daddy win the war?!”) The Museum of London has issued an open call under the title Lockdown Paper

“collecting COVID,” gathering both physical and virtual objects, “from clothing to hairclippers, from diaries to memes,” in the words of curator Beatrice Behlen. In his own series of blog posts, Roger Highfield of the Science Museum has done a far better job than most government agencies in explaining what exactly a coronavirus is, how it works, and how it spreads.

Here in the USA, responses have ranged from the San Francisco Museum of Craft + Design’s bravely upbeat handmade mask challenge – entitled “Let’s Face It,” the initiative encouraged members of the public to approach the emergency in a maximally creative spirit – to the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, where curator Tyree Boyd-Pates set about gathering photographs, diary entries, and recipes from the public. “History is being made NOW,” Boyd-Pates wrote, explaining that the museum’s Covid outreach would be only the first of a series of community-based collecting initiatives. Even the famously slowmoving Smithsonian has shifted its vast bulk into rapid response mode, collecting pandemicrelated objects at three separate branches.

Particularly significant is the involvement of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. This museum will focus on the experience of the Black community, which has been disproportionately affected by illness, economic loss, and death – one of the contributing factors to the recent wave of protests under the banner of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Each in their own way, these initiatives have required curators to retool, abandoning their usual research methods – which they could hardly have pursued anyway, what with libraries and their collections suddenly inaccessible.

Instead, they have been doing what journalists do: make the rounds on the internet, call people, get the scent of a story, and follow it up.

For many in the design field this seems to come naturally. For some years, there has been fluid movement between media and museums. Kieran Long got his start as an architecture critic for Icon and, later, the London Evening Standard; while other leading lights of design curation with journalistic backgrounds are Beatrice Galilee, formerly contemporary architecture and design curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Justin McGuirk, chief curator at London’s Design Museum.

Cormier is another example. Having previously been managing editor at Volume magazine, he describes himself primarily as an “investigator and communicator.”

When I spoke to him for this article, he agreed that curating and journalism are overlapping more and more, particularly in the design space. Ideally, this fusion would combine the best features of reporting and museum work: topicality and urgency, but also deep contextualisation. When the public is facing a blizzard of information (and misinformation) – which Cormier likens to a “fog of war” – the habitual rigour of curatorial methodology can be marvellously clarifying.

The same can be said for Design Emergency, a collaborative project by Alice Rawsthorn (a design critic and formerly director of the Design Museum) and Paola Antonelli from MoMA. These two leading curatorial voices have shifted into reporting mode, hosting a series of Instagram interviews with designers who are generating innovative responses to Covid. I’ve found myself hosting something like a talk show, too – a triweekly series

on Zoom called Design in Dialogue, presented in collaboration with the gallery Friedman Benda. Initially intended to continue the design conversation during the period of lockdown, it has become something more than that: an attempt to actually change the conversation, particularly by addressing issues of gender and racial disparity.

Are there downsides to this approach? Sure.

For starters, as Cormier points out, it’s all too easy to become “beholden to the news,” rather than establishing an independent viewpoint.

All the more so when the story is still unfolding, as is certainly the case with the Covid-19 crisis – and who, stuck at home, would claim to have a comprehensive view on that? Even so, the same standards that any good journalist would observe must apply. If curators are going to step into the role of reporters, they need to demonstrate the same insistence on veracity and reliability that a news organisation should. This is exactly what Gardner has managed to do with the V&A’s Rapid Response Collecting initiative by not just acquiring arresting examples, but also explaining the rationale for doing so. It’s a standard that should be applied to coronavirus responses, too.

Even granting that this can be achieved, however, there’s a bigger danger lurking here: one that has to do with museums’ broader role in society. Trust in public institutions of all kinds is scraping bottom, these days.

Most of the traditional pillars of society are besieged by doubt: government, police and, of course, the media. So far, museums have been a notable exception. Studies suggest that people trust them for reliable information far more than the internet, and also more than newspapers or even history books. Industry groups such as the American Alliance of Museums have placed a great deal of emphasis on this, making the case for “the highest level of accountability and transparency.” In the UK, the Museums Association issued a public statement on collecting and other activities related to Covid-19, saying that this should only be done “with transparency and competency in order to generate knowledge and engage the public.”

These calls have become more urgent in the face of campaigns to decolonise museums, establish political accountability at trustee level, and achieve true diversity in staffing – all objectives that are long overdue, and also inherently politicised.

So here’s the difficult question: in the rush to reach their audiences, particularly at a time of crisis, might museums risk sacrificing one of their greatest assets, the public’s trust? Should curators not instead remain at a lofty remove from the fray, lest they be dragged down into it? In an atmosphere as charged as the present moment – when even wearing a protective face mask or obeying government lockdown regulations can be construed as ideological acts – it’s not very hard to see how curatorial documentation could be seen as special pleading.

For my money, the value of “transparency” (which appears in both of the statements just quoted) isn’t sufficient to allay such concerns. Curators can be totally transparent while still infuriating members of the public who hold contrary viewpoints. But equally, the ideal of the curator as some Archimedean figure, inhabiting a magical position of objectivity, is wholly inadequate.

If museums ignore the greatest upheaval of their time, abandoning their audiences and waiting until it’s too late to collect historically significant objects and information, what would that say about the sector’s position in culture?

This might seem like a zero-sum game, in which museums are faced with an impossible choice between irresponsibility and irrelevance.

But let’s not forget there is another set of players in this drama: the artefacts themselves. Journalism and curating may be converging, borrowing from one another’s skill sets (the adoption of “curatorial” tactics by the media – most often in the guise of content aggregation – is another topic for another time), but there remains a big difference between them.

It’s the difference between saying “here’s what happened” and “look at this – let’s keep it”. Even as this distinction is obscured by recent curatorial initiatives, it seems important to preserve it as a guiding principle. What will protect museums from losing themselves in the wilds of claim and counterclaim, news and fake news, is a faithful adherence to things in themselves – because every object is a fact in the world. On every side there is subjectivity, sure. The decision to acquire something, or even write a blog post about it, is potentially riddled with self-interest and partisanship. And that’s before one gets to the stages of display and interpretation. But objects already condense social and political complexity within themselves.

They are remarkably sensitive witnesses, registering more than we can hope to fully grasp on first encountering them. The primary role of curators is to care for them (it’s right there in the etymology, from the Latin “curare”), in the interest of future generations’ understanding. In a sense, this actually makes their job the opposite of a reporter’s: they are trained not to set the story straight, but to build a foundation on which later interpretations can be built.

At a time of tremendous uncertainty, it’s helpful just to gather evidence. Even more helpful is to invite the public to help with that process, and join in sifting through it. And most helpful of all is to ensure that objects of the pandemic do not slip through our fingers, but will be there for future generations to ponder. Objectivity is impossible in all this, and we shouldn’t claim otherwise. Yet objects themselves can still be anchors – even in the stormiest seas.

Glenn Adamson is a Brooklyn-based curator, writer and historian, and the host of Design in Dialogue.

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