Né vicino né distante

In the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, the scientific community has tried to place itself in a “post-pandemic” perspective, seeking the “new at all costs”. But it is difficult reasoning in a “post-Covid” key, both due to the obvious contradiction of doing so while the health crisis was still ongoing, and because the critical distance from the present had not yet matured. Faced with the effort of the project sciences to demonstrate the ability to ‘project’, that is, to be able to manage prospects for the future, this reflection intends to formulate -at the same time- critical and proactive reasoning that starts from the extraordinary experience underway to reconstruct the conditions of the public space. The health issue has heavily invested the public space, which in turn has become problematic, strongly requiring elements of innovation from the project to guarantee safety in the situations of presence, reinventing the conditions of proximity, directing action to define new geometric and proxemics logics. In the direction to find different questions from the one that asks “what is the good distance from the other?”, the author thinks it is good to start a reflection about the new way experienced during the pandemic, finally finding the conditions in which we can stay together again.