“The quality of housing means taking an interest as much in public health as in the well-being of the inhabitants”

Tribune. The current health and environmental crisis is exacerbating criticism of urbanization, and the promotion of peripheral territories is carried out at the bedside of so-called sick metropolises. The countryside and small towns would be the new remedy for urban overactivity: more nature, slowness and better health.

This account of the fall and redemption is not new. As the philosopher Georges Canguilhem (1904-1995) has shown for medicine, stories about the normal and the pathological have tied up the thinking of town planners for at least two centuries.

From the XIX^e century, hygienists had endeavored to promote public health by considering populations “en masse”, to establish statistics and to map unsanitary spaces intended to be rebuilt according to the canons of modern architecture.

At the beginning of the XX^e century, as rates of urbanization peaked in Western Europe, ruralist ideology teased urban planners, who responded with programs that included parks and “green spaces.”

The current context attests to the permanence of hygienic principles. But the flaws in their application show the means to overcome them.

During the first confinement, families in metropolitan areas and suburbs, cloistered in their small apartments and deprived of free space, measured the reduction of the notion of health to the physiological dimension. Their suffering has fueled criticism of collective housing, the density and the size of apartments. Likewise, the fear of contagion and the application of the principle of solidarity, dear to Léon Bourgeois (1851-1925) [théoricien du solidarisme], have suffered some serious sprains, despite the identification of “clusters” and the curfew measures.

Magic recipes

Faced with the hypothesis of an obligation to vaccinate, the government, under the pressure of small categorical or individual claims, has multiplied the exceptions, making a general strategy incomprehensible. Whether or not they are vaccinated, whether or not they have a health pass, participate in collective life virtually or face-to-face, whether or not they live far from high urban densities and sources of contamination: these are the variables that affect contemporary residential behaviors. Whatever the governments’ will to support economic activity, our societies increasingly obey à la carte health management.

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