Abstract
The spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has allowed mechanisms of power and authority to enter new urban realms – especially the very relationships lived between friends and lovers in bedrooms and parks. All of a sudden, everyone has a right to know who we are close to, when and how, all for the sake of public health and safety, to ensure the further functioning of our established public health system. The new policies transform Western ideas of public and private spheres: our bedrooms have turned into the space of self-representation and workplaces at the same time. On the other hand, what had been known as public space before has turned into the space to be private in: a walk through the city alone or with an intimate person. Yet all of these tendencies come with increased surveillance, not only by our peers, but also through technologies such as tracing apps. The very possibility of privacy and ‘active’ publicity is being questioned, and, through this, the realm of the political. This paper traces the observed shifts in the nature of the private and public spheres through examples in German cities, tracing power via embodied experiences. Those traces are reorganised into three argumentative strands: re/constructing privacies, public space as non-place and the proliferation of the data body. Based on these observations the paper searches for emancipatory perspectives within the shifted spheres of urban social life.
Introduction
It has become hard these days to talk about public health without thinking of emergencies, or rather, the emergency state that public health is in due to the pandemic. As the daily applause for the workers in the health sector is slowly fading and infection numbers are rising again, something has changed within Western urban perspectives upon what is ‘normal’, what is an emergency, and what is not: the prioritisation of COVID-19 above other diseases and social issues has reshaped public opinion and public space in dramatic ways – something reflected in our surroundings and experiences. I, the author of this text, am white, non-binary, able-bodied and have grown up in a state-dependent, lower middle-class environment in central Europe. I am active in urban grassroots processes of city planning, squatting and organising, and therefore I am used to reshaping cities while living in them. The perspective of this text is then one of a person in constant struggle with the new urban realities and with little idea of a life outside of them. As has been experienced by many, the constantly changing policies have had great impacts on my social life and political activities. This has led me to think about those ‘fickle spheres’ of public and private from an inside perspective of urban central European spaces, bringing together my subjective experiences with thoughts about these changes. Bringing forward a subjective, personal and queer point of view is a political act in itself, reimagining ‘the urban through the spatio-temporal messiness of queerness’ (Bain and Podmore, 2021: 1312). This leads to a text presented in an autoethnographic tradition, stories of a lonely flaneur in the city, one that knows that life is a lot messier than academia would want it (Adams et al., 2015). This text is about understanding power dynamics, how the way things are done have changed. To enable these thoughts, the text itself also challenges and changes the way things are written, disclosing the usually private thought process of a wandering mind in the urban: leaving traces.
While I am (re)writing this text, measures all over Europe are becoming stricter, as public health systems are overloaded and new states of emergency are being declared again and again. Obviously, public health systems worldwide were and are still not ready to deal with a pandemic (Stone, 2019) – and we are already two years in. Thus, governments of different nation states have established conduct rules. Those measures vary slightly from country to country, yet all comply with basic functions that are very similar to each other. Above all, there is ‘social distancing’: keeping close contact to as few humans as possible. This also encompasses spatial distancing between humans in non-close contact spaces, with this distance varying between 1 and 2 m and a wearing of masks to cover mouth and nose. Additional to ‘social distancing’, practices, rules and regulations concerning mobility have been installed in many places, such as curfews, so-called lockdowns and rules against what I would call loitering, requiring constant movement or circulation from city-users (Askarizad et al., 2021). Furthermore, there are bans on certain cultural practices that involve congregations, such as consumption and leisure by people in urban spaces (e.g. picnicking in parks, use of playing fields). These laws are not only controlled by digital tracking, video cameras and heightened police presence, but also by a mindset of control: of myself by myself, of my neighbour by me, of me by the authorities and strangers. Every human is seen as a possible threat to each other human, leading to an uncertainty in interactions. This control is visible in the establishing of the term ‘New Normal’ in 2020. It is quite the opposite of the one described by Heinlein’s (1966) coinage of the term to indicate ‘a new normal, free of the Authority, free of guards’: urban life is being controlled in Western cities in a way that has been unthinkable for decades and had never been experienced by most of their population. Empty streets, closed bars, police overseeing parks regularly, almost no cultural or sporting activities and, through this: fewer accidental encounters. To get accustomed to less spontaneity is part of this New Normal when moving through urban space. Many things that ‘City’ meant have fundamentally changed through anti-pandemic measures, some through regulations, others through new conventions and customs. I think of this as reshaping urban health rather than an urban crisis (Xu, 2020).
To take a closer look at how those measures reshape urban health, I will use the official definition of health by the WHO (1946: 100) ‘Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.’
This definition of health is an ideal rather than a reality, as health thus would signify access to clean water and shelter, meaning few people could be called healthy. Acknowledging the WHO definition of health as an ideal, the use of the adjective healthy gains a new dimension: pointing towards the ideal – while unhealthy would simply mean pointing away from the ideal of health. This definition of health follows a three-folded focus – physical, mental, social. Yet the measures against the spread of COVID-19, due to their international urgency, have a focus on ‘the absence of disease and infirmity’. We can see social and mental well-being being damaged through those measures – be it through the increase in violence against women (Taub, 2020) or depression (Ducharme, 2020) or the loss of queer opportunities for contact (Trott, 2020) – during the lockdown phases in different countries.
Under the New Normal, the spheres and definitions of the public (mental space), of public space (social space) and of the body (physical space) start shifting. All of these three categories, the mental, the social and the body are intertwined in the COVID city and can be seen through the three ‘strands’ that are woven through this paper, building upon the ‘traces’ I describe. What I call strands are three different parts of the same problematic, depending on the perspective-lens we wear when taking a look at how urban health is reshaped. The strands are not fixed to ‘real life/analogue’ or ‘the internet/digital’, as those categories are outdated. From my generation onwards, we have always lived in, and through, the internet and with computers. It is as much part of daily life and reality as is cooking. Friends I only video-call once a week are as real as those I meet for a coffee. Or rather, used to meet for a coffee.
Traces
Trace 1: At the office (online and inside, March 2020 – present)
I sit at my desk next to my bed. ‘Home office’ is the name of this practice. I have rearranged my room – this means, my posters, books, clothes and sex toys – according to the expected angle of the camera. You tell me the story of J Toobin, a journalist masturbating during a zoom conference, thinking that mic and camera are turned off.
A bedroom is a public space of self-representation. No longer is its architecture centred around my well-being, comfort and solitude, it is rather that I rearrange it to fit with the view I want others, a public, to have of me.
Trace 2: The walk (Hamburg, April 2020. Lisbon, January 2021)
I go for a walk. Alone, finally alone, not watched by work, looming in my bedroom, lurking around every edge of my private laptop, not watched by anyone, not seen by anyone, not recognised by anyone. I can just wear a hoodie and a mask. I am anonymous, at last – to my peers, at least.
I can go out for a walk without being seen as ‘me’ by other inhabitants of the city, if I want to. However, to go out without being seen as ‘me’ by the public health system, requires me to go the extra step and leave my cell phone at home.
Trace 3: The visit (Hamburg, April 2020)
I meet my neighbours on the staircase. They say they are thinking about calling the cops on the woman on the second floor, as she is constantly having people over.
I first thought this was a bad joke. After all, they didn’t do it. However, as of autumn 2020, the peer governance is growing again – or at least the offers to join in on peer governance are, as the city of Essen, for example, has launched an online form where citizens can directly report witnessed violations of the city’s ‘Coronaschutzverordnung’ (Stadt, 2020).
Trace 4: The park (Hamburg, June 2020)
I visit the park to study and take my cup of coffee out with me. I encounter a band-practice, all set up with their devices, battery powered keyboard and amp, standing in a circle. I see other people, again in a circle, all of them wearing some sort of martial arts outfit and obviously training. I watch two girls doing yoga. I meet and greet other people with their laptops. Next to a public table, there is a homeless person’s tent. It has been here as long as I can remember.
As policies were being loosened, the use of urban public space was more diversified and specific than ever before. More and more people could be seen outside, in groups, doing stuff they would usually do in a closed/roofed space.
Trace 5: Relating (Berlin, September 2020)
We have a date at your place, and you want to know how many people I have been hanging around with in the past couple of days. I say: ‘Well, I’ve been using public transport.’ I try to avoid the question with a laugh. You insist: ‘I need to know whether you are safe or not?’
This makes me feel unsafe. Suddenly it has become a convention to ask other people about their exact whereabouts, unsafe from a queer perspective, even though it is hard to grasp. How is it suddenly of public interest who I am close to, how and in which situations?
Trace 6: At the restaurant (Hamburg, September 2020)
Eating out. We are seated at a table surrounded by plastic walls. Together with the menu, we are each handed one slip of paper and a pen. The waitress says: ‘Please enter your contact data and time and date you were here.’ The badly printed form asks for my name, address, phone number. The waitress collects the slips, once filled out, and throws them into a cardboard box at the entrance.
I am startled by the loose way that people deal with my personal data. The way that it feels acceptable to collect it and just have it out there in the open, easily accessible to anyone who is interested, from a passer-by to police.
Trace 7: Le couvre-feu (France, October 2020)
I heard that Macron, the French Prime Minister, was going to hold a speech on the state of the nation and new measures on 14 October, so I tuned in. The French state imposed a so-called couvre-feu– a curfew. In all bigger cities, from 9 PM to 6 AM, people are not allowed to leave their house except with a special work permission. Macron says that private contacts are the most dangerous ones.
Two things strike me as interesting here. On one hand, that in France the couvre-feu was last imposed during WWII by the German occupation, and, in the French colonies, as tools for counter-insurgency. These are just historical perspectives, however. From an urban point of view, I wonder how the city itself will be changed by the forced change of its socio-cultural rhythm.
Trace 8: This isn’t fun (Berlin, October 2020)
You send me a message containing a screenshot of a text. It says the following: If anyone believes that his happiness depends upon getting drunk at 3 AM in the street, and if he doesn’t understand that by this he is endangering himself and others – then you have to do something against it in all clearness, and this is what we’re going to do (Lenz, 2020). It is a snippet from an interview with a governor of Berlin.
Until now, Berlin has been famous for being a city where people get drunk in the street at 3 AM. Again, I see the change of this metropolitan socio-cultural rhythm, a core element of Berlin urbanity, while going to work is not being questioned anymore, as opposed to Spring 2020, when the German economy was brought to a halt too.
Strands
Strand 1: Re/constructing privacies
The COVID-19 crisis has strengthened and laid open tendencies within the relationship between the private and the public (Low and Smart, 2020). A relationship whose boundaries have always been culturally diverse, even within Western society, but have been shifting for some years. This shift can be centred around the thesis ‘talking about the importance of privacy while constantly publicising’. There are several different senses of privacy and publicity in play here. ‘Publicity’, for example, can mean: 1) state-related; 2) accessible to everyone; 3) of concern to everyone; and 4) pertaining to a common good or shared interest. Each of these corresponds to a contrasting and particular sense of ‘privacy’. What is understood as ‘of concern to everyone’ has changed throughout the last decade with social media enabling everyone to share what they think is of public interest with a certain ‘discursive arena’ on a timeline or feed. This change has gained speed through the spread of the pandemic. As physical health is now everyone’s concern (public), so is the concern of not being infected with COVID-19, since the public health system should stay accessible to everyone (public). Thus, the responsibility for installing the measures is taken by state authorities (public).
While social contacts, or, to put it in the words of Macron or Merkel, ‘private contacts’ (Ettel, 2019), are restricted, it is still widely considered a necessity to go to work and have ‘business contacts’. This shift in relations towards other humans means work is now public, pertaining to a common good. Private contacts, where relations are not primarily economic, do not pertain to a common good. Since having human contacts is dangerous for the common interest of health, they are being publicised. It has become a public matter who you meet, when, for how long and in which circumstance [Traces 3, 5, 7]. Privacy towards peers as well as authorities now has to be constructed actively and willingly, in all of the four senses mentioned above. This process constitutes a re/construction of privacy.
On another level, the urban itself has changed, structurally. By this I mean that there has been a shift from direct to mediated or even text-based communication, and a shift in potential private or public spaces, and how those definitions and their physical realities are shaped by time and activities rather than the other way around. [Traces 1, 2, 4, 8].
As a consequence of social distancing policies, a home office has rapidly become the standard among a certain set of people that do not need to do face-to-face or service work. Home working is not a new practice in itself, but has been transformed, as Preciado (2020) puts it, ‘into a national duty’. According to him, it challenges ‘the divisions that had been at the root of 19th-century industrial society: the separation of the spheres of production and reproduction, the difference between the factory and the home, and, along with that, the patriarchal distinction between masculinity and femininity’ (Preciado, 2020). This has implications for the very notions of the private, as the sphere of reproduction, aka home, has long been seen as a private place, a woman’s place. Even the bedroom is now a public space of self-representation – at least for work and videocalls. Since the public is, in this public health emergency, in a hierarchically-superior position towards the private, it is necessary to physically restructure private rooms to be fit for public representation. Again, privacy has to be constructed actively and willingly.
As another consequence, many indoor activities take place outside and thus are theoretically accessible to everyone. The sense of privacy of, for example, a band practice, is no longer contained by a closed room, but solely by the manner of social interaction between the band members, by the way they look or do not look at passers-by, actively keeping people out of the private space that they constructed in a public park. Privacy is restructured, as it has to be constructed actively within a public space.
Even a very broad popular definition of privacy as the ability to seclude yourself or information from others, already makes privacy a mode of defence and active construction. Yet this active construction is marked by the spread of the public (interest, health and representation) into every niche and relation. As the public and the private are two sides of a coin, the other side of this means a shift towards privatising the public, creating more and more niches within long-unused spaces and reopening the debates on intimacies, sexually and emotionally. For example, by donning masks.
‘We cover our faces to uncover ourselves’ (CrimethInc, 2020): donning masks has always been an important move for those who do not want to be seen by authorities, be it criminals or political activists. Wearing a mask in everyday-life has not been a custom in Europe – because who would want to be seen as a criminal? During the past year and a half though, things have changed, as covering your face is now seen as something a law-abiding citizen would do. All of a sudden, hiding the facial features most used in Western culture for emotional expression and recognition has become a convention. You can move through the city unrecognised by passers-by and peers, you can even enter a store and stay anonymous. This is a special and new kind of privacy, carried out in public space, a privacy of identity towards peers – and authorities up to a certain amount [Trace 2]. New possibilities of secret gatherings out in the open emerge, and since you cannot be seen, you can decide on what you tell your peers afterwards. Your body and dress, through your actions, re/construct the private in the public.
Agamben (2020) wrote that the face is the space for politics, as this is where and how humans put themselves on the line, surpassing the exchange of simple information. This new performance of privacy, therefore, enables you to keep your emotions private as never before, and even being physically able to express them means an active construction of the public.
Strand 2: Public space and non-places
This constant re/construction of the private has to do with the changing importance of physicality in space, as can be seen with the way public space is changing. Space is at the same time product and producer of interactions, it is on the one hand constructed by them and, on the other, en/abling them (Fischer-Lichte et al., 2005). The ongoing re/construction of privacy as mentioned above is thus always also a re/construction of urban space. This does not take place in a vacuum, but within other already existing spaces and categories of spaces. One that I will take a closer look at is the non-place, coined by Augé (1995: 77–78): ‘If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place.’ He continues to argue that the ‘complex skein of cable and wireless networks’ and ‘real non places of supermodernity’ have ‘the peculiarity that they are defined partly by the words and texts they offer us: their “instructions for use”’ (Augé, 1995: 96).
These ideas about space and non-place prove useful when thinking about the restructuring of physical public space and the relationships therein. If a non-place is partly defined by being non-relational, non-historical and not concerned with identity, I would argue that a great part of urban public space has taken on characteristics of being a non-place through anti-pandemic measures. Specific cultures and identities are being cut to fit them. A non-historical space is laid over relations, cities and nations. The anti-pandemic measures crack the fabric of history, as it does not matter whether your city is specifically known for its creative cultural practices (Berlin [Trace 8]) or has a history with couvre-feus (Paris [Trace 7]). The specific urbanity, the public space of a specific city, loses its character: it no longer matters in which European city I am.
Out of the concept of the ‘real non-places of supermodernity’ grows a theory that there has been an expansion of ephemeral non-places, and, with it, the temporal erasure of the concrete/physical ones. With the proponent of texts being some form of public interest (i.e. public health), the individual interaction with texts and pictograms has increased. They are in my staircase, in my flat, at my workplace, at the restaurant, the shop, the park, on sidewalks. They tell me to keep my distance, wear masks, act in solidarity with the elderly, tell me how to wash my hands and more. The public and semi-public spaces are full of visible rules. This ‘internet way’ of dealing with social interactions is seeping more and more into the physical world. Some examples and comparisons:
When I click on a button I know what is waiting there for me and there is no way I could change this rule as a user. When I go to the supermarket I have to wait for a green light to proceed, and there is no way I could change this rule as a customer. Through donning masks or through having a nickname. I am anonymous to my peers but not to the web administrators or authorities.
There are visibly growing parallels between the non-place of the virtual and the type of urban public spaces emerging in these last two years. This enables a new layer of social control to unfold, replacing qualities of public space with qualities of non-place. This can leave a feeling of loneliness and individualisation, of being a mere user of the city and not an emancipated subject. This goes together well with the constant re/construction of the private qua activities, and time rather than qua physicality: urban space itself has become more ephemeral – and so has the body.
Strand 3: The data body
When moving in public, I can decide to go masked, thus less governable by other humans, yet nonetheless visible to authorities through my tracked data. My digital footprint becomes less something I leave behind, but more a kind of aura, co-defining my identity. A Data Body. Growing surveillance through technical devices and the fight for (data) privacy has been a topic for the past decade, as laws and apps ask for more and more data (Dachwitz, 2022). I will focus on the physicality and, again, the active re/construction of the private within the Data Body.
Data Body means that humans are not merely leaving footprints in the digital space, but also in analogue ones, and ever more so since the beginning of counter-pandemic measures. Systems of data collection formerly used on digital platforms have now become common in geographic reality. When I visit a restaurant I am required to leave my data. So while I am there, it is known that I am there as my data is there. I would have to lie about my data to actively re/construct privacy [Trace 6]. In combination with this, several states are introducing apps to trace contacts, some (as Portugal), are even thinking about making it mandatory. Interestingly enough, they do not focus on where you were (physical locality), but on who you met (relational locality). Again, the shift in the understanding of public interest/public space can be seen: physicality is constructed by activity.
To counterpoint this, home is where the physicality sits: The private residence has now become the center of the economy of tele-consumption and tele-production, but also the surveillance pod. The domestic space henceforth exists as a point in a zone of cybersurveillance, an identifiable place on a Google map, an image that is recognized by a drone. (Preciado, 2020)
There used to be a slight difference in the tracing of ‘me’ and ‘my data’, and this difference is blurring. ‘I’ was a person leaving traces of ‘my data’. ‘I’ and ‘my data’ co-exist at the same time. Contact tracing, the restaurant situation and the real-time location of my computer and phone. Yet we move in different spaces. While my Data Body can never leave the non-place, I can. Not only by not being traced, but also just by interacting with other humans, constantly relating and creating history.
Every time my Data Body and I collapse, a new re/construction process of the private starts, visible in the rearranging of the physical place of the private residence or, to be more specific, the home office versus bedroom. Yet scholars are already debating the expansion of surveillance into ever-more private realms in order to keep track of infections – and thus further expanding the realms of re/construction by enlarging the Data Body: Surveillance systems also need to expand beyond health indicators to track social determinants, such as literacy, unemployment, incarceration, and paying more than 30% of income for housing. (…) We need to invest more fully in applied public health research on new surveillance methods, contact tracing, and risk communication, and we need to deepen our understanding of lived experiences. (Brownson et al., 2020: 1608)
There are other new forms of surveillance being tried out in the urban to prevent and solve crime. These encompass an ever-growing Data Body, even down to recognising your very way of moving, making the re/construction of privacy an active activity indeed (Kang, 2018).
Emancipatory perspectives
Moving back to the beginning of this critical commentary, the need for a deepened debate about the meaning of urban health becomes obvious, and so does a more specified approach on healthiness – not simply tracking the social determinants of disease exposure, but exploring the impacts of tracking itself, to bring them it into dialogue with the three-fold definition of health offered by the WHO. How can people be healthy despite living through the COVID-19 pandemic? Bringing mental and social health back into focus means to include social contacts and possibilities for privacy back into consideration for the very idea of health.
Ultimately, this asks for a different take on physicality. As shown above, in current Western discourse the body is something to be protected, physical health of one person means physical health for all and is a public duty, thus impacting the physicality of space. To stay at home and not move is what is asked of the (urban) body: to not take any risk. This idea of a riskless and controlled life is one that meanders through all the traces – from dating to a walk or a visit to a restaurant – as is the feeling of loneliness and individualisation, of emptiness and self-talk that I have also tried to produce throughout the text.
The urban riots and unrest that occurred during COVID-19 take the physicality of body and space to a maximum, endangering and rupturing both. And when seeing health as political, they do not come as a surprise. Either COVID-19 itself (physical health) or the restrictive counter-measures (mental and social health) impact human lives, yet there is little or no political means of articulating this. As the public sphere, a former space of the political, is resembling a non-place more and more, especially health issues are depoliticised by making them public through the one-sided concept of health, meaning that there is no space for articulation.
It is necessary to find space for the political again, as measures (October 2020) against the pandemic taken in France, Spain, Italy and Germany show. Those countries have all agreed on measures against leisure time and social contacts of their inhabitants while keeping up the economy, continuing work in all kinds of forms. These decisions were sold to the public as a means of promoting public health, yet they were mainly decisions against existing privately. As Harney and Moten (2013: 76–77) put it: ‘This economy is powered by constant and automatic insistence upon the externalisation of risk, the placement at an externally imposed risk of all life, so that work against risk can be harvested without end.’ COVID-19 is an ultimate externalisation of risk, and every piece of labour is celebrated publicly as a work against risk, while social contacts and leisure activities are deemed risky.
This means that, in order to break this dichotomy, we could work with risk rather than against it. Taking COVID-19 seriously, as humans, not as institutions, could mean that our next steps lead towards using new forms of urban publicity – collectively engaging in outdoor activities and re/constructing small privacies through activity – as motors for connection and self-organisation. This is, at the same time, a working on what can be understood as private and political, as willingly connecting to people and through this breaking the dichotomy. This is part of building a new understanding of privacy, seeping out into public spaces and spheres, not re/constructed by individuals ad hoc again and again, but through this connection and self-organisation (as seen with several neighbourhood mutual aid projects in the first months of the pandemic) to build something more stable.
To find this new realm of the political, we first need to find a new private, one with relations and history, taking privacy as a basic assumption. A privacy that can be shared with your peers, willingly, and kept away from others. It would be less of a privacy based on mistrust of one’s peers, but more a place to learn to understand our very own needs and boundaries, enabling us to choose what we want to make public and what we do not. Our health, our data, our sickness, our work, our relationships: we must decide what to share and when. Choosing carefully when to share is an urban skill – one that queer activists have relied on over decades – a skill that an emancipated urban society could learn from, creating new counterpublics or ‘relational chains’ (Munoz, 1999: 146) that offer resistance against controlling and individualising acts of power.
This renewed understanding of urban privacy would enable a discussion and realisation at the same time of what each one of us means, and wants, from health and from the city, leaving the emergency state behind. We do not need more surveillance or governance (Proudhon, 1851) in order to use our right to the city and determine our health autonomously – without endangering our physical neighbours.
‘We must go from a forced mutation to a chosen mutation’ (Preciado, 2020).
We need to rethink the very shape of European urban spaces, shaped by COVID-19 and pandemics yet to come. This could mean niches for people to meet in private, unseen, in small groups. Or roofed, vast spaces without walls, public tables and benches, housing for all, distributed health services and a decentralisation of working and opening hours in time (from daytime to 24 hours) and space (from malls to farmers’ markets). In transforming the physical non-places lies an emancipatory power towards creating this new private in the communicative sphere as well. Allowing ourselves to get away from prescriptive, prohibitive and informative communication and back to sharing a story or a secret, if we want to, and to trust again.
