How Does the Pandemic Invalidate the Sociological Definition of the City?

Abstract

This study argues that the restrictions imposed globally due to COVID-19 have reshaped the usage of our urban space, making the sociological definition of the city questionable. The compulsory home office and digital education and the minimalisation of social interactions also affect the nature of the city and, consequently, its definition. Therefore, we are talking about changing cities even though the physical structures themselves have not changed. There is a need to create a new definition specifically for a pandemic or post-pandemic situation that is not a sociological definition based on a community of individuals. This study will first summarise the sociologically based city definitions of the second half of the twentieth century. Then I will analyse the application of these definitions to the usage of cities, to the emergence of new services, and to the apparent emphasis on necessary functioning of the city. Finally, I will examine an option for a new definition, where the user of the city is a society without a community, whose appearance in urban space, for example, with social distance and masks neglects a sense of the classic postulates of the definitions of the city: heterogeneity, density, and size.

This paper is based on my presentation held in the IX International Kant/Bakhtin Scientific Seminar entitled Human Rights, Legal Constraints, Redefined Borders in the Pandemic Era, organised by the Murmansk Arctic State University (MASU, Russia) and the Nord University (Bodø, Norway), in Murmansk, October 20–21, 2021.