Abstract
As the scientific community urgently seeks to understand the uneven geographical patterns of transmission and mortality rates of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become necessary to challenge the tacit assumption that the pandemic is strictly a public health issue that is primarily reserved for the technocratic expertise of health professionals and officials. These discrepancies in outcome imply that the pandemic yields spatial selectivities (Jessop et al., 2008), which have been revealed through the uneven manifestation of societal impacts between places, localities, communities, and neighbourhoods. For this reason, the pandemic and the management thereof must be deemed as social issues that require the input of sociological theory, insofar as its spread is not only spatially embedded but also socially mediated. To foreground a socio-spatial perspective of the pandemic, I propose that we must start with two analytical premises on socio-spatiality.
As the scientific community urgently seeks to understand the uneven geographical patterns of transmission and mortality rates of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become necessary to challenge the tacit assumption that the pandemic is strictly a public health issue that is primarily reserved for the technocratic expertise of health professionals and officials. These discrepancies in outcome imply that the pandemic yields spatial selectivities (Jessop et al., 2008), which have been revealed through the uneven manifestation of societal impacts between places, localities, communities and neighbourhoods. For this reason, the pandemic and the management thereof must be deemed as social issues that require the input of sociological theory, insofar as its spread is not only spatially embedded but also socially mediated. To foreground a socio-spatial perspective of the pandemic, I propose that we must start with two analytical premises on socio-spatiality.
The assumptions underpinning a socio-spatial perspective of COVID-19
First, the pandemic is realized through concrete spatialities embedded in absolute space, suggesting that its transmission is constrained and enabled by the physical, built environment of societies. The built environment refers to the spatial organization of society in the form of physical infrastructure that provides the possibility for human mobility, but inadvertently also forms the precondition for the transmission of the virus by shaping movement patterns, population density and social distancing. Second, social relations are embodied in and through these concrete spatialities of absolute space, which provides the relational context and medium through which people socially interact with each other and their surrounding socio-physical environment. Social agents are embedded in a web of socio-spatial relations, which provide the institutional geography within which they must navigate in their daily lives. This also means that insofar as social agents have differentially situated social identities – shaped by social factors such as their profession, socioeconomic status, religious beliefs – their relationship to and use of social space is fundamentally variegated. Social agents, in other words, do not form a uniform category on which homogeneous assumptions can be overlain regarding their use of social spaces within the context of the pandemic.
Research perspectives on spatial selectivities and marginalized communities
These two theoretical premises provide the analytical lens to examine how different socio-spatial contexts encounter spatial selectivities that might either structurally privilege or disenfranchise them. For this commentary, I will simply shed light upon a particularly urgent research area, namely the spatial selectivities of the pandemic and the lockdown policy initiatives on socially marginalized and precarious communities (e.g. low-income status, minority status). Precarious communities are doubly at risk because (a) they are likely to exhibit a higher prevalence of comorbidities, such as obesity, diabetes and hypertension (Tüzün et al., 2015; Winkleby et al., 1992), which puts them at heightened risk of medical complications if they contract the virus; and (b) their status of marginality is accompanied by mechanisms of socio-spatial exclusion that subjects them to heightened exposure to the virus (see, for example, Wacquant, 2007). For instance, in countries where the wage–labour relationship has become fragmented due to neoliberal reforms, precarious workers are faced with limited labour protection and cannot seek recourse from unemployment benefits, for which reason they are compelled to continue working despite the risks of contracting the disease. Whereas white-collar workers have the option of working virtually from home enabled by IT programs, pink- and blue-collar workers in the service and manufacturing sectors are inevitably involved in a high level of human-to-human interaction. Meat and poultry plants in the US are cases in point, and have recently become the epicentres of contagion in local communities as more than 5000 workers (3% of the workforce) have contracted the disease (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 2020).
Mechanisms of socio-spatial exclusion are also reflected in housing characteristics in the form of dispossessed neighbourhoods. Densely populated neighbourhoods of public housing and large household sizes enhance the risk of contagion within the community through the collective use of public and community spaces, as well as the difficulty of practising social distancing between family members in the same household. In Denmark, Statens Serum Institut (SSI) reports that 18% of the documented cases have been contracted by people of non-Western descent – in particular people from Morocco, Somalia, Pakistan and Turkey – although they only account for 9% of the total population (Statens Serum Institut, 2020). The causal origins of the disproportionately high incidence rate among this demographic subgrouping are currently unknown, although SSI conjectures that it could be partially attributed to the large average household sizes of such communities. However, further sociological research should identify other characteristics of socio-spatial relations underpinning such communities, which become reflected in their mobility patterns. For example, the collective use of religious spaces transforms such localities into potential nexuses of contagion. Enquiries into the cultural norms surrounding social distancing, personal space and physical interaction are also relevant questions that can be further examined.
Policy initiatives in response to the pandemic also yield various spatial selectivities, which is documented by their differential impact and efficacy in curbing the spread of the pandemic, as well as the second-order side effects encountered by marginalized communities. Surveys on the compliance rate with social distancing requirements issued by authorities reveal stark differences between demographic subgroupings based on household income levels, political affiliation and age (Moore et al., 2020; Painter and Qiu, 2020; Singh et al., 2019). One notable reason for breaching social distance requirements is reportedly due to personal concerns about physical and mental health from isolation (Moore et al., 2020). This observation invites further questions on the differential experience of lockdown policies by marginalized communities, who are more likely to have a lack of habitable living space due to the larger average household size and thus feel the need to breach the social distancing requirements. This could suggest that further policy initiatives seeking to enhance compliance with social distancing rules should seek to remedy the underlying socio-spatial conditions that compel specific marginalized demographic subgroups to not comply, rather than issuing large penalties or fines for violating the law. Another distressing trend is the 60% rise in reported cases of domestic violence in April during the lockdown (United Nations, 2020), revealing how policies can have unintended consequences by increasing the probability of violent interactions when people are stuck in isolation with abusive partners. Further research needs to map out the geographies of domestic violence, such that second-order policies can be implemented to mitigate their adverse effects.
