Unique times, unequal mobilities: Daily mobility during the de‐escalation of the COVID‐19 pandemic

Abstract

Scholars have highlighted drastic reductions in daily mobility during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. But what happened when restrictions were relaxed though risk remained ubiquitous? How did patterns of mobility change and how were they structured by socioeconomic resources and social roles? We address these questions using a cross-sectional representative sample (n = 2942) of the population of Andalusia, Spain, after a month and a half of severe lockdown in 2020.We find that older people were the least mobile group and that people living with children and in extended households were less likely to move to take care of others, unlike before the pandemic. Men were more likely to carry out daily mobilities for which women had been traditionally responsible, such as care mobilities. Women were also more likely to be immobile and less likely to commute. Finally, manual and nonqualified workers were more likely to commute, but they were just as likely as any other group to carry out other types of mobility. These results highlight the social character of mobility in a unique context. We emphasize the need to disaggregate daily mobility based on different purposes as well analysing how these are practised by different sociodemographic groups if we want to provide rigorous descriptions of a core component of individuals' daily life.

The Social Construction of Living Space: The Role of Place Attachment and Neighbourhood Perception

“…Figure 2 shows the spatial location of each daily activity, and it confirms the existence of the three distinct types of living spaces found in other studies [28]. The first consists of commuting spaces, which include places of study and work.…”

“…Finally, to answer the third question (Are there differences in the construction of commuting, self-realization, and care spaces?) three separate indices of living spaces were calculated, aligned with the abovementioned recent proposed mobility classification strategy [28]. The first concerns commuting spaces (including places of work and study); the second concerns self-realization spaces (encompassing the residential locations of friends, leisure and free time zones, and non-daily shopping places); and the third is related to care spaces (including the location of children's schools and primarily healthcare centres).…”

“…In fact, terms like "spatial fragmentation" are often used to distinguish different living spaces based on various categories of activities, often differentiating between those related to work and those related to leisure [19,26,27] which could be translated into a generalized differentiation between non-elective (work) and elective (leisure) mobility, along the lines of the classification used in this paper and detailed in the Data Analysis Strategy section. In this work, for a better adjustment to the variables available in our data source, in addition to the two main groups of mobility for work and leisure reasons, care spaces are added, which are partially elective, as explained by Padilla-Pozo et al [28], who proposed this classification. Lastly, the metropolitan structure of the city is particularly significant.…”