Pandemic, public spaces and new forms of use of green infrastructures

Pandemics have historically been great opportunities to rewrite urban policies and to influence future visions. Examples are the cycles of cholera pandemics in Europe in the nineteenth century, which lasted about thirty years and which formally determined what the nineteenth-century city is. It leads to the definition of public plumbing, sewage and gas networks. They were placed right in the public space. The great Spanish influence (1918-1921) formally determined the modern city from a regulatory and theoretical point of view. For example, the Chicago school took its starting point from this pandemic to redefine some rationalist paths and proposals of its. There have been many correlations between the Covid 19 pandemic and the Spanish one, as it emerges from the following excerpt from the paper by John M. Barry (2004), who examines the 1918 flu pandemic. “The situation was like this in all major American cities. In Goldsboro, North Carolina, Dan Tonkel recalled: “We were actually almost afraid to breathe… You were afraid even to go out… The fear was so great that people were really afraid to leave the house…afraid to talk to someone else. . " In Washington, DC, William Sardo said, "He kept people apart...You had no school life, you had no church life, you had nothing...It completely destroyed all family and community life... The terrifying aspect was when every new day that rose you didn't know if you would be there when the sun went down that day. Fear has emptied workplaces, cities are empty ". These tragic events that have hit our cities cyclically have in any case led to the resolution of problems such as, for instance, in Naples, after the cholera epidemic of 1889, the urban space was equipped to house the hydraulic and sewage networks.