Habiter la pandémie

Abstract

This article explores the interaction between habitability and urban accessibility in Covid-19 time. If urban habitability is constituted by a series of adjustments and readjustments that any city makes over time to allow for ‘coexistence’ in both ordinary and extra-ordinary times, we hypothesize that the notion of accessibility is operative to understand how the city redesigns itself in the Covid-19 era. We conducted a cartographic investigation with students from the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris La Villette, which aimed to understand how an idea of urban accessibility might re-emerge from the spatial transcription of government-imposed restrictions. To begin this demonstration, we carried out a ‘cartographic operation’ based on Giambattista Nolli’s method, invented to map the city of Rome in 1748.