Jogging during the Lockdown: Changes in the Regimes of Kinesthetic Morality and Urban Emotional Geography in NW Italy

Michele Filippo Fontefrancesco

doi:10.3390/soc11040124

Michele Filippo Fontefrancesco

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/soc11040124

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Abstract

Jogging is the most practiced physical activity in the west. This form of light running appears a solution to the health problems caused by the sedentary of contemporary dwelling and affirmed the role of the extensive use of urban space as a key to individual well-being and health. The COVID-19 pandemic and the imposition of lockdowns imposed a new form of kinesthetic morality based on domestic confinement; a morality that is in open contrast to that of jogging. The article explores this conflict and its consequences in terms of perception of the urban environment and the society among joggers. Based on case study research conducted in 2020 in Alessandria, NW Italy, this study delves into this abrupt change and explores how the urban spatiality changed for the joggers. In so doing, it asks what this event teaches us about the development of new, more effective, urban policies.

Highlights

The COVID-19 pandemic has appeared to be a phenomenon that can rewrite the consolidated geographies of social relations, exacerbating existing inequalities and requiring communities to revise their daily practices in a radical way [1]
This research investigated the urban emotional geography of joggers in Alessandria during the first COVID-19 lockdown. Their experience points to the radical change in everyday life experienced by the interviewees, which passes through adaptation to an emerging context based on weakened sociality and the compression of the individual space
It explores the practices undertaken to cope with the anti-COVID public measures and their effects on the perception of jogging and the urban environment shared by the informants

Summary

Introduction

COVID-19 Pandemic and the Experience of Urban Space. The implementation of mobility restrictions, the so-called lockdowns, and the fear of contagion had a deep effect on individuals and communities and their use of private, public, and third spaces [2]. This reverberated in the quality of the interrelationships between people and their surroundings and interpretations of the landscape, so that the virus appeared, as Vannini [3] has suggested, to be an atmospheric disease: an invisible circumstance that reshaped familiar places into an uncanny and uncertain landscape. Even the most mundane practices changed their meanings, with the design of a new regime of sign—the collective assemblage of enunciations that defines the individual and collective understanding and guides the acting in the world [5]—which shaped the experience of the pandemic

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