Evolution of City-Organism Fight or Flight?
Sneha Aiyer
I stood in shock amongst my friends on the middle school football ground on January 26, 2001, when a 7.7 magnitude earthquake, lasting over 2 minutes, destroyed many settlements and killed over 30,000 people in the Western State, Gujarat, India. Ten years later, in 2011, I researched the transformation of the city, Bhuj, India at the epicenter of the quake.
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We build to endure, to resist time, although we know that ultimately time will win. What previous generations erected for eternity, we demolish. Then, with similar intent, we lay stone upon stone and build again. Permanence is instinctively sought. The built environment, like all complex phenomena, artificial and natural, endures by transforming its parts. Habraken, N.J, Structure of the Ordinary Many beautiful dwellings, streets, monuments, and lives withered, but they picked up the pieces, adapted to the situation, and prepared themselves and their built environment to endure a future calamity. Like Bhuj, many cities are redesigned after a disaster. Consequently, we redesign how we relate culturally, socially, and even politically to the city after re-organizing it to mitigate future perilous events. The urban human finds themselves constantly updating and generating newer versions of themselves, and therefore we see a rapidly evolving society. We are not strange to these rapid changes in our social interactions owing to the current pandemic. A protein molecule permeated our biological pathways that resulted in reshaping our cultural practices of assembly and congregation, perhaps for many years to come. After almost a year of holding onto the hope that we can go back to our previous state, it is time to see this as
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an opportunity for urban systems to not merely create possibilities to physically distance and provide sanitary conditions, but facilitate an egalitarian society that can have a chance to thrive under any future adversities. The pandemic brought forth imparities of our society that have been ignored and, therefore, most affected as the economic landscape changed drastically in a matter of days in March 2020. With ‘shelter-in-place,’ the onus of reproductive work (Federici 2012) was thrust on women across all cultures. In the last year, 2.3 million women in the US dropped out of the workforce, often to perform child care, when schools and daycares closed. (Jordan 2021) Within this new ecosystem, a “racial justice paradox” has emerged: Blacks and Latinxs are more likely to be unemployed due to the impacts of the pandemic on the labor market, but they are also overrepresented among essential workers who must stay in their jobs, particularly lower-skilled positions, where they are at greater risk of exposure to the virus (Powell 2020). Domestic work in Indian urban homes is typically performed by migrants from remote villages that were suddenly left without jobs or support from the administration. Amidst a complete lockdown, unable to commute, helpless and jobless, many chose to return to their villages on foot. There hasn’t been a time when it was more evident that a city’s infrastructure is measured by the equity of privileges and opportunities rendered to its people. What kind of evolutionary changes within the infrastructural zone will help us prevail under these conditions? In most living organisms, a fight or flight response to stress stimuli causes a reaction within the nervous system triggered in the amygdala secreting adrenaline. The activation of the pituitary gland causes a hormone release that triggers further reactions to boost energy
