Mobility and immobility under Covid-19. Are ICTs promoting a shift in cities?

Abstract

Covid-19 fostered the increasing use of information and communications technology. Although these technologies did exist previously, they acquired a massive validity and were encouraged in the pandemic context causing structural changes in our lifestyles. Their large scale use reinforced the characteristics of hypermodern society, consolidating the promise of simultaneous mobility in different physical and digital spaces and generating multiple individual belongings. Cities under Covid-19 strengthened the digital prime networks allowing fluid urban connections between different geographical coordinates. Yet at the same time, urban territories become more abstract. Our awareness of people’s mobility needs and practices within urban territories becomes diffuse. Without falling into a deterministic trap, the authors point to recent trends in the intensification of the phenomenon and highlight the risk of moving towards an approach that invisibles the urban territory and along with it, socio-spatial inequality. Accessibility to opportunities is revisited in a new digital paradigm that is thought equally due to the lack of a territorial insight on that matter. However, initiatives such as the 15-Minute City, along with the increasing digital business network reveal both mobility and immobility issues that have not disappeared with Covid-19.