A reflection on space and time in Covid-19

So now that we’re all at home and apparently having all this time on our hands because of Covid-19, it’s worth reflecting on how our relationships with both space -- and more specifically, home -- and time are changing.

In a sense, Covid-19 constitutes the revenge of space, more specifically, physical space. It has hit hardest the places that are most densely populated, most connected, and where the flows of people have been the most unfettered.

At the same time, Covid-19 and the policy responses to it have reinforced the importance of home. In recent times, we talked about global cities and revelled in being global citizens (or even city-zens). We talked about going virtual and going to the cloud. We talked about e-residency, hyper-mobility, and flows. We lauded the de-territorialisation of the human condition.

But for all our talk about the “global city”, Covid-19 reminds us forcefully that it is still physically embedded in the territorial nation-state. Real estate matters. Look at how frequently "home" appears in our policy responses: Home quarantine. Stay home notice. Work from home. Home-based learning. Look at how quickly we got our citizens to come home. Just as many other countries got their citizens to go home. And to stay home. That is, if they weren’t already going home of their own accord. It really called to mind this line from the poet Robert Frost: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

Clearly, one of the lessons that Covid-19 has driven home is the importance of home. And "home" in the tangible, non-abstract sense of the word.

Covid-19, and the pandemics to come, challenges us to rethink our notions of space and how we plan for it. It calls into question the extent to which we – as a human species, as a society and polity, as an economy – can transcend spatial constraints. There is a limit to the substitutability of the real by the virtual. We can go to the “cloud”, but provided we are all sitting at home.

Take safe distancing, as another example. If this is to be an indelible part of our new social norms, what are the implications for our national-level urban concept and master plans? At the risk of being facetious, either a place (e.g. a classroom, a meeting room, a dormitory, Singapore itself) has to be twice as big, or the group has to be half as small.

The meanings that we imbue in the spaces we occupy will also change. Although this has been happening already, the one-to-one mapping of meaning to a particular space will increasingly give way to multiple meanings. The bedroom is now a place to sleep and to work as a home office, the living room is now also a classroom as well as for family time, and so forth.

The neat compartmentalisation of life will erode even more profoundly, causing different aspects of life to bleed into one another. This also has repercussions in terms of the rituals that organise our lives: there is potentially no more separation between work and non-work. The home environment is also the work and school environment. For many, they will find that the places they held to be sacred are now also profane, and vice versa; and the places that provided solace are now places that cause stress, and vice versa. The different roles we play -- parent, spouse, employee, boss, whatever -- which we inhabit sequentially will collapse into simultaneity.

Covid-19 has also disrupted how we experience time. In a fast-paced society like Singapore, we find that the greater psychological dislocation we are experiencing is caused not by accelerations (e.g. the fast-rising number of Covid-19 cases, stock market volatility, etc.) but by the massive deceleration of socio-economic life. Being forced to slow down is discombobulating us, as a nation and as individuals.

Covid-19 has also led to a de-linking of “space” and “time”. For example, a person’s so-called “university years” are understood as 3-4 particular years in his or her early 20s (“time”) spent at various physical locations such as the lecture theatre, the lab, the library, dormitory, the sports centre, the pub, the "pak-tor" places and so forth (“space”). Covid-19 has exacerbated this trend, what with enforced online-learning and the physical dispersion of student life which is inherently gregarious and close-knit. Anecdotally, in this time, we hear from students about “friendships never formed” because of Covid-19. How will the class of 2020/2019/2018 remember their university years so dramatically de-linked from the places of daily life?

Covid-19 is a harbinger of what happens when “fast time” -- the world of continuous flows and accelerations that we are accustomed to, sometimes resentfully -- is thwarted by “slow time” that is enforced as a result of lock-downs, quarantines, closures and so forth. There are sociological and mental health dimensions to consider in the longer term. Are we equipped to deal with prolonged “slow time”?

Covid-19 has also up-ended our expectations of when and how we move, and when and how we perform our tasks. For example, business travel and the different meetings and conferences circuits may be permanently transformed. We will have to juxtapose the efficiencies of just-in-time production systems against systems which are slower, with more redundancies, but with greater resilience.

Even in terms of everyday life, it has disrupted how often we do grocery shopping. This in turn has implications for space planning: if you are to buy in bulk and infrequently, how many people have the requisite storage space. The patterns of time, much like the patterns of space, will blur: for many of us, it is no longer clear when you start work and when you get off work. While problematic in itself, the bigger problem arises when those who live in a structured temporal order (say, those who still have regular hours) have to work and collaborate with those with unstructured temporal orders (say, those who work from home, or telecommute). As the Dire Straits "Brothers in Arms" song goes, "We have just one world, but we live in different ones."

Our expectations of the durations of events have also been disrupted. We need look no further than Covid-19 itself: a large portion of the trauma attending the pandemic is the uncertainty as to how long it will last. Indeed, we implicitly assume that there will be a relatively clean break in time such that we can announce a post-Covid-19 era. We need to contemplate the possibility that there can be no such thing as “a post-Covid-19 world”, but that we are living perpetually in an age of frequent pandemics. We cannot, in our complacency, assume that the world will get back to “normal”, because Covid-19 has shattered our established notions of what “normal” is. Nor should we get back to normal, since the present crisis is partly a result of the world that used to be.

Finally, our modern fast-paced and results-oriented societies function well when things are measurable, well-demarcated, and discrete. Covid-19 and pandemics to come will bring about a world characterised by durable and intractable uncertainty, and this will jar with planning systems that are linearly-extrapolative thinking, and still largely predicated on “known knowns” and “known unknowns”. Covid-19 has shocked our assumptions about the fundamental dimensions of our lives: space and time.