Quarantine urban ecologies

Abstract

As of April 2020, billions of people around the world are living under differing degrees of physical confinement due to the Covid-19 pandemic, reshaping the ways in which we represent, affect, and sense urban space. Covid-19 has altered the mobilities and ordinary affects of human and nonhuman animal life in unprecedented ways (Stewart 2007). Confinement has shaken up the quotidian rhythms of urbanites, both human and nonhuman, actual and virtual. We explore these quarantine urban ecologies as they manifest in two prominent and interlinked forms: digital ecologies and ecologies of abandonment. We feel these ecologies differently, and feel differently about them, because they are ecologically different. Until now only virtually evoked through thought experiments (e.g., Weisman 2007), Covid-19 is actualizing these ecologies on a global scale.