Urban Protective Equipment (UPE)                      The New Normal in the Post-Pandemic World       

Date Summer 2020
Location Japan, United States, Italy, United Kingdom
Collaborator Brandon Chan
Award Finalist / NonArchitecture Healing

COVID-19 resulted in the elongation of speed and distance as every spatial experience between defined destinations is stuttered with quarantine zones and testing facilities. A means of familiarizing this alternative state of crisis by integrating it into the dialectic of urban spaces, weaving narratives of quarantine into the fabric of everyday life. As the streets are reduced to anonymous figures in Personal Protection Equipment (PPE) that re-territoralize a now vacant urbanity, we produced a series of graphics that evoked this sudden superimposition of a new normal - a diamectrically opposed parallel image of our cities that operate under its own set of extreme rules. We imagine a universal system spatially optimizing and humanizing the experience of being tested and monitored. Modules that recreate aspects of urban living (commerce, recreation, socializing…) are configured into closed circuits that can be cut off from the wider urban context when necessary. Intended for suspected carriers of an unknown virus or travellers who recently arrived, these independent networks hold limited populations to enable contact tracing, prevent large outbreaks, and facilitate the transfer of confirmed patients to adjoining medical facilities.

Every city has multiple circuits hovering above the street to provide those who are inside a redacted version of their usual pedestrian dérive (Debord), enriching the reciprocity between the body and the momentum of life continuing outside. The centre of these circuits is a social core that has a continuously sanitized limbo zone where inhabitants inside can meet with registered associates from the outside in protective suits.