To promote greater physical distancing and encourage alternative modes of transportation—both for essential workers commuting during the novel coronavirus pandemic and for residents allowed to exercise outdoors—cities around the world are revising transportation policies and repurposing vehicle lanes for cyclists and pedestrians.

In celebration of Brasília's 60th anniversary, filmmaker Pedro Rodolpho has made his documentary O Corpo e a Cidade Modernista available to the public for free. The film was screened at several of Europe's most prestigious film festivals in 2018, the year of its release.

In this week's Seminar on Culture and Contemporary Reality, hosted by the Escola da Cidade, Guilherme Wisnik talks with essayist, author, and host Francisco Bosco. Drawing from the essay "Communovirus" by philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, they discuss how the pandemic will impact the future of Brazil across its political, social, cultural, and economic dimensions.

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Cities are catalysts for encounters and opportunities, drawing in people in search of greater scale and diversity. Now, with social gatherings restricted, what becomes glaringly obvious is our interdependence and the importance of the spaces that sustain exchange and coexistence. Let me explain this through something simple, yet no less significant for this moment: most public spaces in Brazil—squares, parks, sidewalks—when they exist at all, are barren. In other words, they lack the infrastructure to support people lingering.

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Currently, more than half of the world's population lives in cities, a figure expected to rise to nearly 70% by 2050. According to data from the United Nations (2017), the majority of this construction will be concentrated in cities across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

As such, cities play a central role in climate change, as they are both the primary sources of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from human activity and the places where many of the impacts will be felt.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a rapid increase in hospitalizations for severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in Brazil, and is expected to severely strain the capacity of the Unified Health System (SUS). Major cities already have confirmed cases among socially vulnerable populations. In this context, it is crucial for healthcare planning to identify where socially vulnerable groups with limited access to the SUS live, and which healthcare facilities are likely to face the most severe bottlenecks in meeting the demand for hospitalizing critically ill patients.

While the first edition's theme was SHARE, and the second was CIRCULATE, the 3rd Tomie Ohtake Institute Leroy Merlin Design Award proposes REVIEW as its core concept—an opportunity to look at our social and environmental context, critically analyze it, and ask: how can a project contribute based on what is already in place? 

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Current Brazilian politics is an anti-politics aimed at the annihilation of institutions, such as the notions of the public and the state. Guilherme Wisnik talks with Fernando Haddad about prospects for imagining ways out of this abyss.

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One way to separate spaces is by using lightweight partitions, which can be either fixed or mobile. Besides defining boundaries between rooms, these partitions are much thinner than traditional masonry or even drywall walls, allowing for better use of space and greater flexibility in layout configurations.

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