Editorial: Reflections on human mobility in pandemic and post-pandemic times

Abstract

Many of the theories on territorial development have been built in the last fifty years around the concept of human mobility, understood as the mobility at the regional, national, and international level of people, goods, economic factors, financial flows, and cultural transmission processes. However, the outbreak of the pandemic forces to review these assumptions, as well as the very essence of human (im)mobility. During the pandemic, on all the geographical scales, changes in behavioural patterns regarding coexistence, leisure, housing, work, and services were recorded and the resilient responses to the socio-health actions gained ground. The aim of this paper is to reflect on the disruptions caused by the pandemic to human mobility, and on the modifications and continuities that post-pandemic times have brought. The key questions revolve around what has changed and what remains, i.e., what role human mobility will continue to play in post-pandemic times.