MAKING UP URBAN SPACE. A COMPARATIVE ETHNOGRAPHY OF SOCIAL DISTANCING ON PUBLIC TRANSPORT

While social distancing has emerged as a global strategy in addressing the COVID-19 pandemic, its relevance in social science, particularly as a category for the study of everyday life, remains a subject of debate. This research, relying on the complementary aspects of interactionist studies, neo-materialism, and neo-Marxist perspectives, delves into phenomena and ecologies of social distancing on public transport within Milan, Amsterdam, and New York City. The study, moving beyond the pandemic context, addresses two primary inquiries: how does social distancing emerge from public transport experience? Furthermore, what insights can the relationship between social distancing and public transport provide about urban space as a whole? This ethnographic investigation explains how social distancing produces – and simultaneously is produced by – urban territories through material and symbolic negotiation of geographical, geometrical and imagined distances. This project, approaching the field from different angles, examines social distancing in the choreographies of mobility practices on Milan’s public transit, the configurations of unequal urban experiences in Milan and Amsterdam, and the narratives and collective imaginaries of public transport in Milan and New York. Each case highlights how the ways that people deal with social distancing are situational and mediated by a plurality of heterogeneous actors. This exploration prompts a shift from binary interpretations of material and immaterial realms to a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of urban space.