Melbourne Chinatown during COVID19

Took this photo shortly before Melbourne itself was affected by the pandemic. At that time, it was more about China and Chinese. Local business and the Chinese community were already affected. Chinatown hence, becomes a symbolic space of the beginning of the total unimaginable circumstances to come. Writing in the mist and middle of the pandemic, urban city has lost some of its original meanings: busy, crowded, prosperity, creative, dominant, capital accumulation, and out of all, social and interactive.

It’s not empty, more emptier than this photo I took back in February 2020. It has become a spaceless place. Henri Lefebvre famously puts, there is no space with people, we make spaces to sustain the ways of our lives, the rhythm of society, the structure and dissemination of power, of course. Major metropolitan around the world are now spaceless in a sense that they all lacking sociality - not only people but people’s actions, physical motions, bodily practices, which constitute the meaning of urbanity and life in developed economies.