The rules of the pandemic are part of our lives for more than a year now. A big part of them is keeping a minimum distance in order to avoid an easy spreading of the Sars-Cov-2 virus. How does the physical distance affect us? And how will we behave once we can meet up again? The urban geographer Anke Strüver reflects on this question as follows:
"After more than a year of lockdowns and intermittent opening-up, distancing seems to have established itself as a new characteristic. We turn away instead of greeting each other on the sidewalk, and we communicate digitally instead of in person. Confined and crowded spaces, social interaction and encounters have been central characteristics of urban life for a long time. The pandemic put an abrupt end to that. While we are still in the midst of it and the majority of the population is unvaccinated, we are still very cautious about meeting up. Increasingly, we just stay home. For anyone who does not live alone, this means there is an intense physical densification of people around them in the home.
In public places, however, a kind of spreading out is evident: along the riverbanks of the Mur here in Graz, for example, newly trodden tracks have appeared, because we are swerving around each other. After the pandemic we will need to re-learn how to approach one another – both in the social sense and in terms of the physical spaces we use."