co+labo Radović @ Keio University

co+labo radović   co+labo in the times of Coronavirus + false impressions of the slowdown  

Looking at these two images (above and below), one could conclude that, since our previous entry, nothing has changed. These photos depict exactly what was on the other two, which were posted exactly two weeks ago (further down). Both then and now, Darko and Davisi were captured on WebCam, standing at an empty Riva in Split, and sending their regards to co+labo, as co+labo design competition team works online, on their current competition project. While on these photos all looks the same, in reality everything that we used to take for granted in our everyday lives has been altered. That, most dramatically, applies to some of the key issues related to our central research focus, the themes associated with public and public-like places across cultures. This uncanny condition, in which seemingly "nothing happens" while everything around us changes rapidly, will be one of the key co+labo and co+re themes in 2020-21, and beyond.

That fine-tuning of our research focus will start in coordination with City Space Architecture (CSA), organisation based in Bologna, which  brings together an international circle of academics, practitioners, activists and others interested in public space, and publishes high quality Journal of Public Space. In responses to these unusual times, the CSA core team members have (in collaboration with Chinese University of Hong Kong) initiated new project entitled "2020: A Year without Public Space under the COVID-19 Pandemic“. As from this year Darko co-Chairs the CSA Advisory Board of Public Space Experts, he will coordinate co+labo efforts with that important initiative. We will start by helping to identify the key questions arising from this moment which, among other consequences, enforces an unusual level of global uniformity.

As the crises of this magnitude have the capacity to initiate paradigm shift, Darko and co+labo radović will insist on radical, critical and creative perspectives, and strategies of response. We need to be aware that the Coronavirus has not accelerated processes of globalisation (turning us all to Zoom, Webex and similar tools which, as safe and as sterile they are, question all that public sphere, realm, space are and should be about, everything that we take for granted when exercising our right to the city). Not only that this virus has not accelerated globalisation, but the truth is precisely opposite: the globalisation itself made this pandemic possible. Having "chosen" a particular, environmentally and culturally unsustainable kind of development, as part of an overall spectacularization of our daily lives, we have also globalised the virus. An epidemic became - a pandemic. 
Always positive, co+labo opening hypothesis is that, in a fashion similar to the emergence of this pandemic, some minor, local, infraordinary practices orientated towards creating a better world might gain power and spread globally. (Of course, that is an utopian thought. Minor practices seem to have a slim chance, they only might succeed. But - it is worth trying.) 
That is a co+labo way.