Covid-19 and our sense of place

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has prompted governments around the world to enact numerous policies and systems to contain and manage the spread of the virus. Almost universally, these solutions, in one way or another, have affected our sense of spatiality: quarantine orders constrict our movement in space while social distancing enforces distance between subjects, for example. While space is commonly thought of as measurable and quantifiable, both phenomenologists and thinkers within the domain of human geography have suggested an inherent existential aspect to spatial ontology that quantitative explanatory structures cannot account for. This paper will develop a phenomenological study of our sense of space and place, and investigate how it has evolved due to the changes brought about by the pandemic. It will argue that the changes have brought about a disruption to our everyday relationship with space and place in both the public and private realms, and that this disruption presents an opportunity to examine the relationships of meaning that typically inform our spatial experiences. It will examine these relationships by considering anecdotal accounts along with a phenomenological framework inspired by the works of Martin Heidegger.