INTRODUCTION

 

The focus of this essay lies on the analysis of specific interrelations between the Coronavirus pandemic and the topics such as physiology and body experience, nationalism and regionalism, governmental power and its implication on everyday life as well as the counterbalancing effects of the digital space on mental health. The selection of topics is based on personal observation during the time of the pandemic and follows the notion of scale -  from the microscopic and personal space to architectural dimensions and further on to the national and global scale. Decrease in social activity and isolation form the reaction to the pandemic and the digital media acts as a substitute to those tendencies. As of today, the Coronavirus outbreak is still evolving which makes this work a contemporary witness of the time it is written. In this regard this essay does not only explore the topics mentioned above but also documents some of the discussions and developments when they happened with the help of newspaper reports and other contemporary sources.

 

The title of this essay is a reference to a quote on a sign which first appeared on the front door of a café in Colorado. Despite governmental shut down orders it opened illegally and customers deliberately refused to wear face masks or keep safe distance to each other. Similar forms of protest against the lockdown could be witnessed in a number of other countries as well. The quote therefore highlights the public debate about the dangerous nature of the Coronavirus and the necessity or effectiveness of governmental reactions to it. Furthermore, it declares the home a safe spot for the scared while the use of public space becomes “an act of rebellion”. ² As Michel Foucault writes, the act of division, for example between ill and healthy or by nationality or gender, is one of the processes involved in objectivisation and thus forms subjects of power relations.³

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First, this essay helped me to analyse and understand current changes and events during the time of the first lock down (in Austria) and the period afterwards. Now, this work enables me to gain insight into the process of reflecting the past while anticipating further challenges the pandemic might bring about in the future. 

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ABOUT BIOLOGICAL BORDERS, PHYSIOLOGY & PERSONAL SPHERE

 

This pandemic is, as most health crises are, a crisis of the individual as not only the impact on our society, but even more so each individual is part of the threatening potential of the Covid-19 pandemic. Its dimensions, although the impact is of a global scale, are defined by the human physiology. 

 

The human sneeze can emit light particles - so called aerosols - up to a distance of 7-8 metres⁴, which then can stay airborne several minutes. Heavier particles which are emitted through coughing and speaking travel about 0.5 - 2.5 metres.⁵ The risks and the infectiousness of airborne particles heavily depend on various factors including temperature, wind speed, humidity, size of the droplets and the number of viruses carried in those droplets.

 

Combined, those factors draw an invisible sphere around each one of us. In this way, this personal sphere now becomes more dominant in our daily lives. Everything that happens outside of this sphere seems to be of no harm, everything that intrudes might potentially be harmful to us as we get exposed to the risk of infection. The longer this crisis and its restrictions continue, the more incorporated and lasting the new sensitivity will become. In addition to (or in replacement of) these physical norms, in many cases, governments have defined a safe distance for us, our personal sphere if you will. It ranges from 1 metre (e.g. Austria) to 2 metres (e.g. UK) but most countries opt for 1.5 metres (e.g. Germany, Australia, USA 6 feet or 1.8m).

 

If juxtaposed with Edward T. Hall’s interpersonal distances⁶, these new norms of social distancing highlight some similarities in the definition of bodily spheres. Hall’s most intimate distance around the human body ranges up to less than one inch, which can be interpreted as the sphere of clothing and in this case face masks. The personal distance (ca. 0.45 to 1.2m - distance from family and very close friends) and the social distance (close phase 1.2m to 2.1m - distance when talking to friends) fall into the spheres banned because of social distancing measures. Consequently, this suggests an automated form of social distancing with unfamiliar contacts which leaves the new norms to regulate our close social contacts.⁷

 

With the introduction of legally mandated face masks as additional protection, our physical barriers become even more perceptible and visible. Face masks inevitably visualise the fact that each person can potentially infect somebody else. And although most masks don’t provide sufficient protection for the individual wearing it, they nonetheless remind us of the border between our body and the space around us. Similarly, the sensation of using gloves and disinfectant for our hands reminds us of the tactile trace we leave and our body movement, which otherwise we do subconsciously most of the time, therefore, automated and subconscious actions need to be reconsidered and adapted.

 

Earliest types of masks during the plague with their pointed noses aimed, beside other aspects, at keeping distance to infected people and prevent subconscious contact. All these developments lead towards a new and at least temporary form of body awareness in the way we experience our bodily spheres and the spatiality connected to it, but also our close environment and surroundings to which we relate and react to. Consequently, the overall decreasing effect of the pandemic becomes perceptible with our human body and in the most extreme case, for example self-isolation, the worldwide pandemic is broken down to the individual.

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THE BABY ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM⁸ 

 

The legal framework introduced by governments to address the pandemic, drastically impacted our everyday life and consequently our spatial experience as well as the use of architecture and the public space. It is therefore highly unusual for most of us to witness such restricting and widespread governmental power structures. 

The rift between private and public space dramatically increased as “stay at home” or “shelter in place” orders were issued and the use of and access to public infrastructure was strictly limited to certain exemptions. 

 

In Austria for example, those exemptions had been⁹:

 

1. the prevention of damage to life and property 

2. to assist people who need help 

3. to cover essential needs and requirements such as food and medicine 

4. to go to one’s workplace 

5. public places in the open (e.g. streets and some parks) if the mandated distance between persons can be guaranteed at all times. 

 

Many countries introduced much stricter legislation, especially concerning the stay at home order and the limited access to public space (compare to point 5). Additionally, points 3-5 include specific guidelines on how to minimise the risk of transmission such as social distancing, the use of face masks, limitation of the number of customers or visitors to 1 person per 10m2  and the implementation of protective barriers such as glass partition walls or measures to ensure the required distance. Shops and institutions, if allowed to open, quickly adopted and introduced or altered their layout and organisation to meet the criteria, thus forcing the “user” to follow the guideline of this “new architecture”.¹⁰

 

The analysis of measures as introduced by supermarkets, shops and other institutions indicates a more or less fixed routine of movements and procedures customers have to obey. It further shows that paths of incoming and exiting visitors cross each other which is problematic in the current situation. Additionally, various forms of micro-management can be witnessed, for example when and where to put on a mask or to disinfect one’s hands, to stop and to wait or to take a shopping cart. 

 

This strongly resembles the architecture of security zones at airports, transport hubs, public buildings and tourist attractions which serves to order the masses or provide safe zones. By nature, it is a highly commanding type of environment which aims at merging the individual into a more manageable group to be handled by a standardised set of rules.¹¹ Let’s keep in mind that there is an intrinsic connection between the legal framework, e.g. building codes, and the actually built environment and therefore exercise of power by law and design itself are intertwined. Institutional power as exercised by states is managed between the two poles of individualisation and totalisation¹² and for this reason the consequent effects range between those extremes, too. When Foucault talks about the integration of individuality into a system such as a state, he also remarks that the condition is, that individuality has to be subject to specific rules. This pandemic not only brought with it the introduction of new and specific rules, it also made the struggles visible which are inevitable in order to subordinate individuality. These struggles become obvious in showing power exercising by reconstructing spatial organisation and relation with the tools of micro-management of movement, spatial measurements and accessibility. 

 

The same factors can then become the act of rebellion and protest which effectively elevates inconspicuous gestures such as not wearing a mask (and formerly wearing a mask at protests) to a political and power relating meaning, similar to the effect of walking while a pedestrian light tells you to stop. Especially the requirement to wear masks seems to become a highly protested issue since protesters see it as a (visual) form of suppression and as a loss of self-determination to wear a mask.¹³ 

 

The pandemic does a sort of unmasking of its own, or at least a temporary visualisation, in the way power is exercised through restrictions of space, movement and the “management” of the individual as well as of the masses. As the crisis shows, long standing norms and traditions can change rapidly and we too are subject to this change. 

 

DEGLOBALISATION - NATIONALISM AND REGIONALISM

 

The Coronavirus pandemic has the power to newly contextualise space on a regional, national as well as international scale. In a two-phase process, the reactions to the pandemic cut existing transborder relations and had them renegotiated and reinstalled later on. Consequently, the effects, similar to the inter-relational space between humans, had been the decrease from a higher level (global and continental) to a lower level (national, regional or even communal) of involvement and interaction. 

At first, travel restrictions for certain groups came into order, then national boarders were closed to cut off the movement of people and further on the movement of trade. This led to a sort of isolation unequalled in decades. As the number of infections decreased nationally, a second phase set in which was initiated by diplomatic negotiations of “partnerships” on how and when boarder restrictions could be lifted again. Nation states entered new forms of coalitions, most often through interest driven bilateral discussions, introducing “travel bubbles” and “green lanes” - zones of unrestricted movements of goods and people. The example of the intended “travel bubble”¹⁴ between Australia and New Zealand shows how difficult and fragile such solutions are as they heavily depend on the state of the pandemic in each one of the participating countries.¹⁵

 

In the European Union, where freedom of travel and movement is of essential importance for the integrity of the common spirit as well as the single market of an otherwise heterogeneous group of nation states, these actions are especially troublesome. Similarly, in the U.S., some states introduced a mandatory quarantine for visitors from other heavily affected states.¹⁶ This situation highlights, that the formation of new (temporary) alliances within any union can lead to beneficiaries of this crisis and therefore potentially cause rifts if forms of segregations and separations occur.

 

The introduction of measures like isolation and quarantine can target the spatial cohesion of any form of collective as social, economic and cultural bonds are getting disrupted. Dependent on the scale of the measure, for example national, regional, communal or even smaller, the form and severity of disruption varies. 

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Countries like France introduced a system of regional (political) zones and assigned them a certain status of dangerousness¹⁷, based on the number of infections. The accompanying effect of this downscaling is the deployment of a regional and communal momentum to the handling of the pandemic, as seen for example in the state of New York, where the state took action instead of waiting for a national response. In contrast, other countries opted for a nationwide consistency but reserved the right to local shutdowns, curfews and quarantine if necessary. 

 

By observing the development of the pandemic it becomes apparent that news reports and media coverage of the pandemic heavily rely on diagrams and charts in order to transport otherwise abstract information. The underlying  concept of these forms of communication is to sort and furthermore rank and to contextualise information.

 

Evidently, these tools promote a form of competition or the rating of “performance” between countries which ultimately leads to comparison at best and nationalism at worst. Charts can be adjusted and scaled which can range from global to national to communal level. Therefore the power of charts lies potentially in enabling them to single out and highlight cities and regions because of their statistics, therefore bringing the possibility of segregation to the smallest entity. With specified news and local information, this brings the crisis closer to us. 

 

Nonetheless, all approaches as well as discussions display a necessity for spatial fixation of the crisis in order to communicate and to chart the pandemic. Due to the occurrence of “clusters” and the immense number of testing, the locality of the virus can be described. The response to the pandemic further destabilises relationships and mercilessly highlights dependencies as not only exemplified by the temporary collapse of global trading and its supply lines but also by political policies.¹⁹

 

VIRTUAL EXTENSION AND  CONNECTION

 

Forms of limitation, be they voluntary or mandatory (compare to chapters before), are the dominant effect of this virus outbreak. With the world closing down because of the pandemic and its limiting effects to our spatial experience such as movement, consequently, our human relations and interactions have suffered the most. Physical conversations were subject to rules of social distance, face protections and other restricting effects. In many cases this rendered the day-to-day interactions impossible. 

 

It is therefore unsurprising that digital communication experienced an increased demand of communication “tools” for private and business meetings to compensate for the lack of physical interaction. Especially with the increased implementation of home office²⁰, internal communications with co-workers, clients and others are held digitally.

 

The consequent effect is the integration of a new “work environment” in our private environment, improvised to fit into the existing spatial order since most often flats do not offer an additional room for the purpose of work. The personal space becomes backdrop to public discussion. Apart from physiological problems due to an improper working environment, it is also a privacy and psychological issue to expose our private environment to an audience. The effects of digital media on human behaviour and well-being are plentiful and substantial. Exemplarily, due to the limitations of digital communications (reception, image resolution or image and audio quality etc.), information on our conversational partner gets lost which limits our ability to “read” body language, facial expression and subliminal information. Furthermore, effects such as camera angle, lighting, background etc. might convey misconceptions and communicate unintended information to the communicating opponent. Overall, the quality of conversation can be linked to our well-being due to imbalance of oxytocin and other hormones, which otherwise are emitted in “good”²¹ human interactions and positively affect our stress level.

The virtual space complements our physical environment, it enhances the “real” 

world and sometimes even substitutes for it. Technology therefore offers the possibility to dissolve the border between reality and virtuality in varying degrees of engagement²². As “mixed reality” spans everything between those two extremes, it is augmented reality and augmented virtuality which have the capabilities to expand the real environment and to bridge physical obstacles such as distance. Consequently many institutions have adopted their work to a digital workflow in order to communicate with customers, citizens, pupils and students. Online and digital economies, for example in the form of online shopping, have pioneered this form of “communication” in their field which is why they have benefited from this “real world” crisis. Other entities such as schools, universities, libraries and museums²³ are in the process of adopting to this change. 

 

CONCLUSION

 

The Coronavirus pandemic still impacts almost every aspect of our lives. The purpose of this essay therefore was to analyse four different aspects of this crisis and to think about accompanying developments. The first chapter focuses on the physiological aspects and how they are interlinked with legal considerations such as social distancing. Factors such as the output of particles and aerosols while sneezing and coughing not only determine the response to the pandemic but interrelate with our personal and private spheres as they demonstrate the spatiality of the matter in hand. 

 

As a health crisis, it is deeply connected to the human individual as not only each individual can be affected but also can affect and infect other people. This correlation is visualised by the face mask, a symbol of this (and every) pandemic. Consequently, it does not protect the person wearing it but reduces the risk for others. 

 

Furthermore, as the second chapter expands, the face mask is heavily protested among groups who see it as a sign of subordination and governmental power. In combination with other forms of legal restrictions, such as stay at home orders and restrictions of movements, the exercise of governmental power became another dominant aspect of this pandemic. Many laws have clearly visible effects, this second chapter also explored the implementation of legal guidelines in the built environment and discovered certain methods of how to “control” the public, for example the implementation of small obstacles and barriers to channel the masses and deal with the individual. 

 

Methods of recontextualisation and reorganisation can be observed on a bigger spatial level. As the third chapter documents, the pandemic induced a two-step process in regard to global, international and national as well as regional relationships. At first, it forced governments to suspend trans-border travel of persons and goods in order to limit the spread of the virus, and consequently, these relationships were renegotiated including the terms of how to reopen and reconnect. Because of the varying situation of the crisis, new alliances were formed which increased the possible imbalance of previous power structures and coalitions, as for example in the EU or in the US.

 

To counterbalance the limiting effects of the pandemic, digital communication serves as a way to bridge distances and restrictions. Home office and home schooling has entered our private space and causes a shift in terms of privacy and power relations. Additionally, home schooling, web meetings etc. suffer from technical and logistical difficulties and can’t substitute for physical communication as studies have shown. While we have to be aware of current constraints concerning this technology, it nonetheless offers an opportunity to ease the negative effects of the pandemic. 

 

In conclusion, the dominant feature of the Coronavirus pandemic is limitation and its various forms of decrease in spatial as well as in social, cultural and economic terms. It forced a retraction to a smaller level. In this regard, the smallest entity is the individual itself. Without the usual social relationships and under the impact of legal power, the individual is left behind in the smallest spatial dimension which is the apartment or the house and in the most extreme case a single room e.g. in case of quarantine. Furthermore, face masks and gloves limit our spatial freedom even further and let us sense vividly our personal “boarders”. In the most extreme case, even the air we breath can be dangerous which adds to the physiological and psychological isolation. 

 

The exercise of governmental power has further limited our freedom and has quickly made us subjects to new norms and alterations to our behaviour, leaving the used path and entering improvisation and exposure. Unity is at risk when the pandemic has the power to single out countries, regions, communities and even individuals because of their “status” or “performance”. 

 

Adjusting to the increased isolation, we respond to it by expanding our digital space, our forms of communication and information. We augmented reality and tried to substitute for the temporary limitations.

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