
COVID-19: Mapping Chicago’s Transit Recovery
What do we learn about transportation—about movement itself—when we stop moving?
With ongoing pandemic-driven global lockdowns, our economy, our society, and our lives have ground nearly to a halt. There are few if any airplane or train trips, and travel by car has been dramatically reduced. Entire industries are teetering. Global trade is under severe pressure. Tourism is expected to lose $1.2 trillion. We've just . . . stopped. For a creature accustomed to frequent motion, it's a huge psychic and economic challenge.
Is there an upside? A mind shift—an emerging geospatial consciousness—was under way long before the virus. It has been driven by both environmentalism and new technology, known collectively as location intelligence, which has enabled us to literally see and measure the world in radically new ways. This is helping us grow a new sense of place—and that is, inevitably, transforming our understanding and experience of mobility and our management of transport, whether of goods, materials, or ourselves.
In other words, we're learning something about journeys and destinations. So what happens to transportation when we see the world through this new lens?
In the world envisioned by Yi-Fu Tuan, the father of humanistic geography, place is opposed to space—the intimate versus the distant, the grounded versus the expansive. Space is the empty universe, the unmarked, the unknown. Place, in contrast, is created by the human mind, by the social processes of imagining, understanding, planning, and conceiving. So maybe the issue isn't what we learn about motion when we stop moving. Maybe it's what we learn about place when every place, including those we're moving through, becomes infused with meaning and value.
By Ian Koeppel, a cultural geographer and France-based international expert in the transportation industry for Esri.