key: cord-0056886-khiqq2ig authors: Young, Alison title: The Limits of the City: Atmospheres of Lockdown date: 2021-02-20 journal: Br J Criminol DOI: 10.1093/bjc/azab001 sha: dcc959ea3b91b255dabb08deeff347cf14926200 doc_id: 56886 cord_uid: khiqq2ig Criminological engagement with urban environments has burgeoned, including investigations into the criminological sense of place and into the atmospheres of crime and justice. This article analyses cities under lockdown in the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Used in numerous cities, lockdowns conjoin public health initiatives and crime control to restrict the location and activities of citizens. Drawing on textual and ethnographic exploration of lockdown in Melbourne, Australia, the article examines how we make meaning in lockdown through processes of sensory and spatial interpretation. Such an approach exposes both atmospheres of control, through the criminalization of everyday activities, and numerous instances of subversion through resistance to and adaptation of the spatial and sensorial characteristics of lockdown. The article argues for the importance of the sensory as a means of conceptualizing, repopulating and redesigning future cities after lockdown ends. more than adjectives, instead allowing the senses (and the dynamics of sensory perception) to move from fodder for description to sites of meaningful analytical engagement. (emphasis in original) The consideration of the sense of urban places makes possible three valuable lines of inquiry: first, questions of aesthetics and aesthesis (Matthews 2019) or how we make meaning through processes of sensory interpretation and judgement of all aspects of everyday life. Indeed, what came to be known as 'left realist' criminology emerged partly through a recognition of the impact on the senses of such occurrences as exposure to loud noise, litter in the streets and the degradation of urban spaces (Lea and Young 1984: 55) . Second, a sensory criminological investigation of the city takes up the question of atmosphere, which can be 'conceptualized… in respect of the bodies, or subjects, between whom it establishes relations and connections' (Young 2019a: 2) . Such subjects are not only the individual human subjects moving within a space but rather involve 'the assembling of the human bodies, discursive bodies, non-human bodies, and all the other bodies that make up everyday sites' (Stewart 2007: 80) . To this extent, and perhaps counter-intuitively, a sensory investigation encourages criminology towards a posthuman, or transhuman (Amin and Thrift 2002: 5) , understanding of crime and the city. Finally, investigation of the ways in which we make sense or urban environments exposes the continuing significance of atmospheres of control in everyday life, and their subversion or resistance. In this article, the analysis of place and sense in the city follows the approach of Amin and Thrift, who propose 'a phenomenality of [urban] practices' capable of understanding urban practices as engineered and entrained but argue also that 'they constantly exceed that disciplinary envelope', with each encounter 'a theatre of promise in a play of power' (Amin and Thrift 2002: 4) . In doing so within the context of an analysis of urban lockdown as a response to COVID-19, the article suggests ways in which we might reimagine the city in criminological thinking. Before 2020, when we imagined a city, it was almost certainly not a city under lockdown. The use of lockdown strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic has ushered in what might seem like a new form of metropolis as numerous cities and towns in countries around the world went into lockdown. To the extent that societies have long deployed quarantine, isolation and law enforcement regimes in response to plague and pandemic illnesses, governmental responses to COVID-19 were predictable and, in many respects, unremarkable (Foucault 1977; Elden 2003) . Their impacts on how we think about cities, crime and space, however, are worthy of detailed consideration. To do so, this article engages most directly with lockdown regimes in Melbourne, Australia, but draws also on other cities where such strategies have been deployed. Lockdown can involve several different elements, activated to varying degrees of intensity. In March 2020, Australian states and territories imposed Stage 3 lockdowns: these involved directives to work at home, to observe hygiene advice around handwashing and physical distancing and to reduce one's sphere of interactions. In June, most Australian cities resumed versions of the activities that had previously constituted conventional urban life. In the state of Victoria, however, swiftly increasing case numbers resulted in the imposition of a postcode-based Stage 3 lockdown in the north and west of Melbourne in early July. This included what was euphemistically called a 'hard' lockdown of nine public housing towers for several weeks, with residents confined to their apartments and armed police stationed on every floor of each tower. 1 Subsequently, Stage 3 restrictions were extended to the whole of metropolitan Melbourne plus one shire on 9 July. As numbers continued to rise, on 2 August, a Stage 4 lockdown was applied to Melbourne. This was maintained in Victoria until 27 October, a total of 12 weeks. Aside from a partial reopening in the month of June, Melbourne had been in lockdown for just over six months between 21 March and 27 October, one of the longest lockdowns in the world. 2 Comparable lockdown regimes of varying duration can be found in other countries and in individual cities within them (Beaumont 2020) . 3 Under lockdown, our presence in the public spaces of the city is called into question: 'What are you doing? Stay at home', said the Victorian state government public health slogan. A suite of behavioural rules, with a parallel set of administrative offences targeting their infringement, are derived from emergency powers backed up with a mobilized and expanded police force. Focussing on the sensory and spatial atmospheres generated by the rules, and by experiences of them, allows us to understand how lawful conduct under lockdown might feel as well as understanding lockdown's expanded repertoire of criminality and related expressions of dissent about lockdown regulations. 'Lockdown' can thus be conceptualized as including behavioural rules, infringement of the rules, the various items required to observe the rules and the ways in which they are sensed by the human subjects participating in or rejecting the resulting 'ontologically heterogeneous field' or within 'heterogeneous assemblages' (Bennett 2010: 23) . Under lockdown, alterations to places and our use of them are common. Many of these involved microtactics of control. On the pavement outside shops, 'X's taped or painted on the ground indicate where to stand while engaging in social distancing. Hand sanitizer is required at the entrance to commercial premises. Sometimes staff take the temperature of all prospective customers, who must queue for entry after the thermometer confirms their lack of fever. Even Melbourne's post-lockdown 'Covidnormal' signs at shopping malls proclaim 'mask required as condition of entry'. In the streets and other public areas, many individuals have developed a spatialized choreography of risk management, moving to the far edge of the pavement in order to maintain as much distance as possible from the individuals coming towards them or taking an ostentatious step away from anyone who stands too close to them. Such practices have 1 On the ways in which pandemic public health measures intensify extant surveillance and policing of racialized communities, see Brown (2020) . To use Sheptycki's framework for analysing policing strategies in response to the pandemic (Sheptycki 2020), the 'hard lockdown' of public housing in designated areas of Melbourne can be considered as a targeted shift to 'high' policing modes that fit incongruously within the rhetoric conjoining police enforcement with public health. On the discriminatory treatment of public housing residents during lockdown in Melbourne, see Lemoh (2020) . 2 The state government retained mask-wearing requirements, restrictions on gatherings, in terms of numbers and locations, and density limits for hospitality and retail premises until 8 December; some requirements (such as mask-wearing on public transport) are still in place. 3 In Chile, Santiago began a hard lockdown in March, which was kept in place throughout most of 2020. Argentina, Bolivia and Oman also operated lengthy lockdowns with strict conditions. Throughout the northern autumn of 2020, lockdowns were reinstated in most European countries. France reimposed lockdowns in Paris and five other cities in November; in late December, Germany had renewed its stay-at-home orders with only supermarkets and essential retain services allowed to open. After England had started easing lockdown restrictions, Leicester was put back in lockdown in July 2020, and other city-based lockdowns were instituted in Manchester and Glasgow. The British government later initiated a 'tier' system, with stringency of lockdown depending upon tier level. This was followed by a national 'hard lockdown' for one week and a subsequent return to the tier system. In the aftermath of the US election in November, President-elect Joe Biden stated his intention for a 100-day lockdown to begin after his inauguration in January 2021. 'materiality, corporeality, atmosphere and affect' (Kindynis 2017: 986) , and the spatialization and sensibilization characteristics of lockdown atmospheres will be discussed in this article by means of two idioms: how lockdown strategies attach (us) to place and how everyday life in lockdown is sensed. To identify the ways in which urban spaces have been altered, and those alterations sensed and experienced, a number of sources were utilized. Over a period of months, news media articles were collected, detailing the transformation of urban spaces in numerous cities around the world during lockdown. Poetry, photographs and short films were also compiled and studied. In addition, documentation of the spaces inhabited by the author was undertaken. This source of material included both an inner suburban neighbourhood and also the central business district to which visits were made during the various lockdowns applied in Victoria. 4 The result was a ragged archive of material, which became the basis for what Amin and Thrift name as 'strange mappings' of the locked-down city, seeking 'the network, the fluid, the blank figure' (Amin and Thrift 2002: 4) and the 'sensoria', or 'plurality of cultural, technical and social forms of apparatus through which the world is known' (Wark 2020: 5) . In Victoria, the government's underpinning strategy for lockdown condensed into a single, spatially specific slogan: 'Stay safe, stay home'. 5 But as Boyce Kay notes: 'What might it mean to understand and promote the private home as "safe?" For whom is it so-and for whom is it not?' (Boyce Kay 2020: 4; see also Bradbury-Jones and Isham 2020). The home has also at times been the setting for custodial punishment as when convicted offenders are placed under house arrest (Schenwar 2014) . Detention at home retains some of the pains and constraints of imprisonment, seen in the evocation of incarceration communicated through their naming as lockdowns. That the home had become a kind of 'container space' (Hayward 2012: 453-4) jars with its affective signification. 6 While 'lockdown' became the most common name given to the public health strategy through which people spent most of their days within their homes, some jurisdictions, especially in the United States, used other terminology. 'Shutdown' shifted the communicative emphasis from constraints on movement and activity to the cessation of commercial, educational and recreational activities. 'Sheltering in place', a term first used in Cold War planning documents (King 2020) , emphasizes the beneficial aspects of restricted movement, along with a substitution of 'in place' for 'home'. Australian public health strategy utilizes the language of 'staying at home', which assumes that most people are at home when lockdown takes place. Many, however, are unhoused or 4 The researcher, through living in the lockdowns under study, undertook what can be considered an involuntary 'placebased discovery-through-the-body' ethnographic technique of the type discussed in Garrett and Hawkins (2014: unpaginated) . The fieldwork, 'urban wandering' (Kindynis and Garrett 2015: 11) , took place both within the places and encounters in the researcher's daily life and also on purposive visits to the centre of Melbourne during Stage 3 lockdown in April 2020, the 'relaxed' lockdown in June and July 2020 and the Stage 4 lockdown in August and September 2020 and was documented by means of photographs and field notes. 5 On social media, this was often adapted to 'stay the fuck at home', a phrase that featured in a short poem read by Samuel L. Jackson on late night television in the United States; many Twitter users rewrote their 'handles' to include the phrase. 6 Similarly, the connotation by the word 'hotel' of holidaymaking pleasures was subverted by the use of now-empty city hotels for the mandatory quarantine of returning travellers. forced into temporary homelessness through being excluded by the lockdown from the places they were previously staying (couch-surfers, for example). Others have housing that they do not wish to be in during lockdown, such as students in college housing or shared dormitories. For others experiencing physical or emotional abuse, or financial stress, the home may be more risky to their well-being than all the places now shut down by the public health regime. As Brown writes: 'The carceral society on "lockdown" with its "stay in place orders" models house arrest amidst new forms of public surveillance and transgression that dominate the daily efforts at life and living' (Brown 2020: 2) . In the state of Victoria, the government declared a State of Emergency in March 2020 and a concurrent State of Disaster was declared in August. These enabled the generation of 'directions' under the Public Health and Wellbeing Act 2008 that have been enacted, varied, added to, relaxed, retightened, retightened again and then progressively relaxed according to dates and stages set by a 'Roadmap' towards 'Covid Normal'. The Roadmap utilized a spatialized nomenclature for a temporally organized set of practices projected as necessary to achieve certain data-the numbers of COVID-19 cases transmitted within the community. At each stage of the Roadmap, behavioural practices were underscored by dozens of 'administrative' or regulatory offences in order to control public conduct-'rule by law' as Sheptycki notes (Sheptycki 2020: 160; emphasis in original). These government-initiated atmospheres of control have had notable impacts on citizens' lives and everyday activities. First, lockdown strategies have effects both in respect of the criminalization of previously lawful everyday activities. In that respect, lockdown joins a long history of regulatory strategies that have expanded the roster of infringements and crimes. In respect of everyday activities, and the 'net-widening' effects of criminalization (Cohen 1985) , singing without authorization in public spaces can be unlawful (see Quilter and McNamara (2015-16) regarding unlicensed buskers); standing or walking in the street has become increasingly regulated when it is done as part of protest activities (McNamara and Quilter 2019), as is sitting in public places. Individuals without housing, for instance, are well acquainted with the experience of being 'moved on' by police for sitting in a location that the police do not approve of, such as outside a shop {Young and Petty 2019). Walking and driving have long stimulated police intervention when done by non-White individuals, often with fatal consequences (Gilroy 2001; Hart 2016; Clarsen 2017) . The expansion of regulatory offences under the State of Emergency orders creates, for the population in general, an increased criminalization of the everyday. During Stage 4 lockdown, the entirety of metropolitan Melbourne, a population of 4.9 million, were subject to rules governing the most banal of everyday acts: handwashing (a minimum of 30 seconds), walking in the streets (no more than one hour per day), clothing (face coverings to be worn whenever outside the house), shopping (one trip per day), travel (no further than 5 km from home) and socializing (prohibitions on having guests in the home). The study of lockdown is, therefore, capable of creating knowledge as to how populations are governed, with a pandemic offering myriad opportunities for the overarching governance of a population interior to a designated territory (Foucault 2007) , whether that be organized via national border, city boundaries, postcodes or specific buildings (Elden 2013a) . The territorial governance objectives of lockdown lead to the strategy's second consequence, which is an increase in the surveillance, policing and punishment of already marginalized or disadvantaged groups. Policing and public (ill-)health conjoin for individuals in these groups, who often experienced both a harsher lockdown than the general population and higher case rates of COVID-19 (Brown 2020; Evershed 2020) . In Melbourne, the 'hard lockdown' of nine public housing towers for a period of several weeks meant that 3,000 residents, often migrants from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, including some who had escaped conflict zones, were placed under police guard, not allowed to leave their apartments, rendered dependent on the state government for the supply of food and essential goods and compulsorily tested for COVID-19 (Lemoh 2020). As Bianchetti et al. write: The main roads of our cities may be empty, the mountains on the horizon finally clearly visible, but many, especially in the Global South, are forced to share limited and precarious spaces. Those who need to mix with others to earn a living, experience at the same time the loss of urbanity, conditions of spatial compression, and feelings of panic and desolation. The city of quarantine is a definitively unjust city... (Bianchetti et al. 2020: 302) Lockdown, third, intensifies the performance of the everyday practices constituting the 'microbiopolitics' of a city (Thrift 2008: 198 ; see also Amin and Thrift 2002) . Public health directives under emergency powers foster for city inhabitants a normative awareness of everyday self-obligations and a sense of entitlement to judge the failures of others-'the cop in your head always present' (Brown 2020: 2) . Everyday urban life was already constituted by innumerable rules, obligations, invitations and possibilities. For Simmel, such 'stimuli' prompt continual intensifications and relaxations of emotional attachment in the city: 'every crossing of the street' plays a role in maintaining the intensity of urban life (Simmel 1971: 325) ; during the pandemic, efforts to press buttons using knees and elbows or to obviate such contact through the full automation of crossings shows how the pandemic has reconfigured the existing intensities of urban space. Lockdown regimes thus require the observation of a repertoire of lawful conduct as well as engendering an array of ways in which public health rules can be infringed. To adapt arguments made by Elden about place (Elden 2013b) , lockdown strategies disrupt the affective volume of a city, by thickening its regulatory tactics and thinning its networks of connection. While the new administrative offences of the pandemic, such as not wearing a face covering or congregating in groups, are enforced through the imposition of fines, 7 the altered bodily gestures and movements that have emerged in public spaces reveal a deep and parallel need for other atmospheres of control-ones that citizens can deploy for themselves and which find their place in the pandemic city through our sensory perceptions of its changed environments, 'spaces configured in the totality of sensory information' (McClanahan and South 2020: 13). Relations of connection between places and senses play a crucial role in the generation of meaning and value (Kindynis 2019; Millie 2019), including the construction of 'atmosphere'-what Fraser and Matthews define as a 'spatialized feeling' (Fraser and Matthews 2019: 2) . Campbell writes of the need for criminologists to examine the significance of an 'embodied experience of place' (Campbell 2013: 35) and an engagement with atmospheres assists our understanding of how the sensory components of a place, event or experience may be both engineered for human subjects and can also constitute emotional attachments for the human subjects within them (Anderson 2009; Adey 2013; Kindynis 2019; Young 2019b) . Urban experiences and urban environments thus exist in the senses as well as in spaces (Amin and Thrift 2002; Thrift 2008; Hayward 2012) . Borer (2013: 966) writes of the importance of identifying ways that 'culturally embedded and embodied individuals use their senses to make sense of the cities where they live, work, and play'-and in which they are locked down. Experiences of the city under lockdown generate multiple shocks to the senses, exposing the precariousness of expectations as to how things might be and memories of how things were. Lockdown is dominated by a governmental drive for control, mirrored by micrological shifts in everyday practices. But, at the same time, lockdown has given rise to numerous 'escape attempts' (Cohen and Taylor 1976) by subjects, including attempts to drive through the so-called 'ring of steel' composed of police blockades on roads leaving Melbourne, the wearing of masks on the chin but not over nose and mouth and repeated efforts by individuals to congregate in numbers and places prohibited by the public health directions: according to Police Commissioner Shane Patton, '[officers have] found people hiding in cupboards' (quoted in Pearson and Sakkal 2020) . Several anti-lockdown protests took place in Melbourne (as in many other cities): protesters who refused to observe distancing requirements, to wear masks or to disperse were arrested, fined or sprayed with oleoresin capsicum spray by police. 8 Less expansive expressions of resistance to lockdown by some individuals disrupted the affective dividends of compliance for others: a woman walking in the park with face mask on experienced distress when a passing jogger shouted at her, 'it's not real, you know' (Prior 2020) . The unrealness of COVID-19 was a sentiment expressed also in graffiti: 'the government lies' and 'it's just a flu' was written on a freeway bridge, visible to thousands of car drivers each day. 9 Others, tacitly accepting the veracity of the virus's existence, simply wrote 'fuck corona'. 10 Throughout several months, control strategies, such as lockdown and its administrative offences, were entwined with a range of tactics that resisted or rejected them. Such 'entanglements' resulted in 'relays' of regulation and subversion that constitute less a set of rules and more of a program or way of life, 'not singular and… continually in process' (Gabrys 2014: 45) . These 'emotional knots' (Thrift 2005: 138) within the city lead to a combination of extensive and intensive atmospheres permeating the everyday spaces of the city and communicating their affect to the subject through myriad sensory differentials. Following McClanahan and South, some of the resulting affective sensory encounters are set out here as a 'sensorial criminological agenda' (McClanahan and South 2020: 9) of the pandemic city. 8 The beachside neighbourhood of St Kilda was the frequent setting for arrest and spraying of protesters as occurred on 19 October and on 3, 15 and 19 November (see e.g. Paynter 2020). 9 Seen by the author on 7 December 2020. 10 Seen by the author in April 2020. That a city under lockdown would look different seems obvious, and yet the appearance of city space after lockdown proved both shocking and compelling to news media, writers and photographers. Newspapers published photographs of Malaga, Milan, New York, Paris, London, Melbourne and Sydney and more, showing the strange spectacle of cities without their crowds of commuters, consumers and workers. 11 Of Melbourne, Joel McKerrow recites in the poem 'Australia Locked Down': 'it was an empty city and the echo of solitary footsteps walking down pavements and through the buildings that only yesterday were bustling'. In Dublin, Stephen James Smith narrates in his poem 'Collectively Counting': 'we wait for the petals [of cherry trees] to scatter and fall all across Ireland in our streets and lonely lanes'. These two cities look uncannily similar in lockdown, depicted by means of drone footage, the poets' words intoned over images of traffic lights flashing to streets with no cars, police patrolling the streets for those infringing lockdown rules and pavements without pedestrians. Other cities' archetypally familiar locations are rendered strange by lockdown. Collie writes of New York City: 'One of the more eerie images I've seen in the wake of the planetary spread of coronavirus is the digital billboards at Times Square flashing their usual brilliant pinups and advertising slogans to the now deserted streets' (Smith 2020: unpaginated) : the absence of the audience for consumer advertising undermines the taken-for-granted ubiquity of such advertising and defamiliarizing this well-known and much-viewed place. Trams and buses, whose passengers would normally be crowded into each other at every rush hour, are, under lockdown, almost empty: in Melbourne, 'the bus sings lonely… trams collect the ghosts of passengers past' and 'escalators still move with no-one to move on them' (McKerrow 2020). The absence of vehicular traffic also generated vivid transformation: during lockdown in Melbourne, few cars could be seen despite the prevalence of car ownership in Australia. Anyone in the central business district could stand in the middle of a normally busy street and look for miles in either direction without seeing a car. Other cities saw a similar dwindling of car use. The BBC journalist Dan Johnson used a dashcam to film his commute into central London and then set the speeded-up footage to music and posted it on Twitter 12 : the way his car seems to careen through near-empty streets acts as an index of an absence both exhilarating and troubling. Staying, working and schooling at home: lockdown decreases the presence of people in the streets of a city, and it is their absence that became one of the most remarked sights. In Melbourne, pedestrian traffic in the city centre was substantially reduced: average foot traffic per hour outside Flinders Street Station in 2019 was 3,792; dropping to 333 in April 2020, under Stage 3 lockdown, and reducing further to 207 in early August under Stage 4 lockdown (Butt and Turbett 2020) . The central business district is 'the big empty' (Callaghan 2020); McKerrow's poem to Melbourne notes 'these vacant city streets'. It is as if people's disappearance was capable of actually being seen or, as though, like a crime scene, the streets might contain traces of their vanishing. But what could be seen in lockdown was primarily absence and, as a visual trope, it had a powerful affective impact. Bianchetti et al. criticize the tendency of those struck 11 See e.g. the photographs collected by Hecimovic (2020) for The Guardian. Ai Weiwei's documentary Coronation shows lockdown in Wuhan from the first to the last day of the crisis there: see https://www.aiweiwei.com/coronation. 12 The film can be viewed at https://twitter.com/DanJohnsonNews/status/1246370476059959297. by the locked-down city's visual emptiness to deploy post-apocalyptic tropes, pointing to the luxury of framing urban emptiness 'as a dystopian object of contemplation' (Bianchetti et al. 2020: 302) . For most commentators, the absence of individuals in public space did not connote 'public health' but was indeed read as an after-image of devastation. Thrift writes of how the 'emotional aftermath' (Thrift 2005 : 138) of disastrous events, 'from terrorist attacks to earthquakes and influenza epidemics' (Thrift 2005: 134) , means that safety is often understood only through association with fear. The visual fascination exerted by the photographs and drone footage of locked-down city centres speaks to an almost forensic interest: what atrocity, what crime, happened here? The answer should be 'a pandemic, which requires a public health strategy in order to avert a crisis'; instead, the sight of lockdown's effects on public spaces allows the fantasy that the crisis has already taken place. Lockdowns were implemented within a context in which touch had been problematized early on. From late February 2020, individuals were encouraged to avoid shaking hands, using elbow 'bumps' and toe touches as substitutes. These were later superseded by 'air fives', gestured at another from the prescribed social distance. Contact with surfaces touched by others was first discouraged and then singled out as a potential method of infection. In Melbourne, signs on pedestrian crossing poles proclaim that the signals are now automated, attempting to stop people pressing the button that might allow them to cross the road. Dozens of new cleaning crews, employed by the state government, walked from intersection to intersection, and from tram stop to tram stop, wiping down surfaces as they went. Such services are key components of urban infrastructure, essential to a citizen's sense of a functional, ordinary everyday life; Thrift notes that, especially after a disaster, the visibility of municipal cleaning and other urban services can engender optimism about a city's abilities to 'repair' itself (Thrift 2005: 136) . The increase in the number of cleaning crews during lockdown no doubt also bespoke a desire to reassure urban users about the cleanliness of surfaces they might touch, although, given governmental stay-at-home requirements, the audience for this performance of safety was in most part reduced to those essential services workers still travelling to and from home. On tram windows, notices stated: 'We're deep-cleaning and disinfecting this vehicle every day'. However, the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission (IBAC) investigated corruption among the operators of Melbourne's public transport companies. Intercepted phone calls revealed that the train fleet manager told the head of the cleaning service Transclean simply to 'make up the name of a chemical' that would be used for the 'deep-cleaning' required by the pandemic. IBAC's investigation found that Transclean had failed to disinfect train carriages despite receiving additional funding from the state government to do so and, instead, allegedly used the extra monies to make payments to transport company senior managers (Jacks 2020 ). Anxiety about virus transmission from surfaces touched by an infected person in a train or bus thus generated the setting in which both extensive corporate corruption and the duping of commuters could take place. Even the public health strategies designed to protect individuals from infection exerted a tactile corporeal stress. During Stage 4 lockdown, when masks became mandatory, victim/survivors of crime could obtain medically authorized exemption if they found a mask's contact with their face to be retraumatizing. Anxiety about touch led to individuals wearing plastic gloves when they left their homes. In order to touch items without protective gloves, hands require sanitizing; months of being laved with chemicals in this way have produced eczema and dermatitis on many hands. Touch was no longer only a cause of anxiety about virus-contaminated surfaces but was also a form of corporeal irritation: the pains of lockdown intensified the corrosion of skin from hands and fingers. As the knowledge about the novel coronavirus developed, it emerged that a common symptom of infection is a loss of the ability to taste or smell. In addition to the destabilizing notion that two senses might act as indices of infection by a sometimes-fatal virus, lockdown generated anxiety about taste by reference to privation and absence. 13 Supermarket aisles periodically emptied of various goods: toilet paper most frequently but also, at various times during Melbourne's lockdowns, pasta, potatoes, chicken, apples and lettuce. Bok choi sat unwanted in a supermarket when all other green vegetables had disappeared. While the pandemic brought fear about the loss of ability to detect smells, it also has had its own odours. Some are idiopathic to the crisis, others are familiar ones reworked into new spaces and times within life in lockdown. In Melbourne's initial lockdown, the scent of hand sanitizer filled the air around those cafes or shops that remained open. Individuals still using public transport carried tiny bottles of it, dangling from backpacks, and, intermittently, the air in any space might fill with a scent that mixed antiseptic chemicals with an overlay of eucalyptus or lemon. Vannini registers another pandemic smell, 'the acrid smell of the Nanaimo mill cranking out pulp to make N-95 masks' (Vannini 2020: 272) . Once Stage 4 lockdown was in place in Melbourne, cafes and restaurants could remain open only for takeaway business, and anyone walking through city streets might encounter the aroma of cooking seeping out from a shuttered café as it prepared meals for Uber Eats delivery. Such olfactory encounters raised memories of past meals, prompting nostalgia and anxiety in equal measure. One Twitter user commented: 'something I miss is smelling different smells. You know how you can walk down the street and go into different shops and cafes and buildings and interact with people and get to smell all these different smells? I miss that'. 14 Smell travels through air, as do the invisible droplets of coronavirus infection, although the virus itself is unscented. Lockdowns were, in many cities, accompanied by requirements to wear masks when outside the home. Walking the city streets while masked generated what seemed like a radically curtailed radius for breathing-a few millimetres of space around nose and mouth, with escaping exhalations fogging up eyeglasses. Infectious diseases experts calculated where to stand such that droplets would not travel through the air to be breathed in by another. From these calculations, rules as to 'social distancing' were derived: 2 or 1.5 m, depending on where you live. Experts argued as to how much faster droplets could travel when someone shouted, coughed, 13 McClanahan and South point out that restriction or withdrawal of food has been used in carceral settings: anxiety caused by the temporary privations of the pandemic might thus allude to the pains of punishment (McClanahan and South 2020: 11). 14 Posted on Twitter, 11 September 2020. sneezed or sang. In Melbourne, joggers and cyclists were exempt from the wearing of masks, and many took up running in order to retain the possibility of breathing unmasked air; others, walking masked through the city streets, grumbled about breathing the unimpeded panting breaths of sweaty joggers as they pounded past them in a park. McClanahan and South note the forensic capacity of smell in respect of pollution (McClanahan and South 2020: 14) , ferrying evidence of damage from the scene of contamination to olfactory receptors. And whatever it is carrying, air travels to the 'lungs and breath' that are fundamental components of the 'material soul' (Parikka 2015: 103) . The novel coronavirus is recognized to have numerous harmful effects on the body, but its archetypal impact is an attack on the lungs such that sufferers often struggle for oxygen: seriously ill COVID-19 patients require intubation, the administration of oxygen or the mechanical assistance of respirators. The inability to transport air from the exterior world into the lungs in order to maintain life recalls the phrase now emblematic of the Black Lives Matter movement, 'I can't breathe', arising from numerous incidents in which Black individuals have been killed by police, including being asphyxiated from chokeholds or restraint practices but also denoting more generally the crushing weight of long decades of racism. Protests against state-sanctioned violence enacted on Black bodies gained global visibility in mid-2020 after George Floyd was suffocated by a police officer in Minneapolis: Floyd's pleas to be allowed to breathe echo those of COVID-19 patients. Structural racism also intensifies the effects of the pandemic: Williams and Sanchez note that, as a result of structural inequalities, which even at the best of times have restricted access to health care and education and exacted a toll on Black bodies, during the current pandemic, Black Americans are dying from COVID-19 at a rate 2.4 times greater than that of their White counterparts (Williams and Sanchez 2020: unpaginated) . For all its apparent ethereality, air is a profoundly contested terrain (Adey 2013), a scarce resource in a radically stratified society. What does a locked-down city sound like? For many, they sound quieter-there is less sound than before. In New York City, noise recordings made one year apart show a drop of 5 dB in urban noise during the pandemic (Bul and Badger 2020) . In central Washington DC, a drop of 6 dB was recorded: Wagner calls this 'massive', equivalent to the difference between morning rush hour and 2 am quiet (Wagner 2020: unpaginated) . Some reported that the reduction of industrial noise led them to be more aware of 'smaller' sounds, such as birdsong. Wagner writes that, when lockdown began in Washington DC, 'the day's usual noise never arrived. The robins continued to sing, joined by a choir of White-throated sparrows, cardinals and Carolina wrens' (Wagner 2020: unpaginated) . Some remaining industrial noises became more apparent: 'Trams rattle down the uncongested streets ferrying few commuters' (Collie 2020) . 15 Sometimes, the absence of conventional sounds was unsettling enough that technology was enlisted to 'restore' them. In many cities, sports matches were held in which players ran around in empty 15 Numerous accounts of altered soundscapes during the pandemic can be found in the City Road podcast, 'Listening to the City in a Global Pandemic', at https://cityroadpod.org/2020/03/29/listening-to-the-city-in-a-global-pandemic/. stadia: in Japan, crowd noises were piped into the stadia for the players' benefit; in other countries, crowd noise was overlaid upon visual footage to replicate the prior sensory experience of viewers at home. The urban soundscape was not just depleted of certain noises; others were added to it. In some Italian towns, people sang from their windows or balconies during lockdown. In many cities, people stood at front doors, clapping or banging pots to indicate support for healthcare staff and emergency services workers at a fixed time every evening. Vannini describes the adoption of this habit on the island that he lives on: 'Seven o'clock. People on our island begin banging pots to invisible distant health workers. Our homes are in the woods. No one can hear us. Our loud bangs echo with a sinister tone through the forest' (Vannini 2020: 270) . In Melbourne, after the State Premier declared a State of Disaster in Victoria and imposed the Stage 4 lockdown, a Friday night screaming session was suggested on a Facebook page: 'Covid's shit. Every1s a bit sad. Just stand on ur porch and scream until u feel a bit better. Let's all unite in our shared depression'. 16 Fifty-four thousand people indicated that they were interested in the event and 24,000 took part; participants posted videos of themselves and their neighbours shrieking into the winter darkness. The locked-down soundscape was thus a transformed one: less traffic noise, fewer jackhammers and drills and more birdsong and rustling leaves. These changes are not affectively neutral. Bul and Badger write: 'The city no longer sounds the same. And that realization is as jarring as the sight of empty streets' (Bul and Badger 2020: unpaginated) . Juan Pablo Bello, the leader of the Sounds of New York research group commented: 'To me, it's the sound of the city aching…It's not a healthy sound in my mind' (quoted in Bul and Badger 2020) . Moving through the street, the individual is aware of a 'disturbing tension between this new silence and the frightening social conditions responsible for it' (Wagner 2020: unpaginated) . The city's 'sonic ecology' (Atkinson 2007) has been distorted. Technological senses have long been part of everyday life in urban spaces (Amin and Thrift 2002: 120-1; Gabrys 2014; Cardullo and Kitchin 2019) . The pandemic has both tweaked existing technological relations and grafted new ones onto locked-down bodies. Tracking apps, already used benignly to 'find my phone' and also more malevolently in order to facilitate gender-based violence, have been adapted for the pandemic city to sense bluetooth signal strength and convert this into maps that display the density of infected individuals in an area and into information about proximity to positive cases of COVID-19 (Visontay 2020) . 17 Machines can sense the emanations of other machines; and machine owners deploy their devices in ways that generate affect as powerfully as when bodies meet face to face. One Twitter user based in London tweeted on 13 December: 'I have a covid tracking app. Today, for the first time in months, our 16 Event details can be found online at https://www.facebook.com/events/2738223623055680/. 17 Whereas an app developed jointly by Apple and Google has been effective in tracking COVID-19 in Britain, Switzerland and other countries, in Australia, a far lesser technology has been used, resulting in the successful identification of only 17 cases, also not found through manual contact tracing (Visontay 2020 ). local area is not the darkest shade of pink. We are the second darkest shade!'. 18 The individual at home, locked down to avoid COVID-19, looks at a display of shaded hues derived from the signals of phones or the addresses in a digital database and understands these colours, dots or lists to denote infected bodies, capable of transmitting a virus through the touch of contaminated surfaces or the exhalation of air. Such moments involve a more-than-human sensing (Lapworth 2019) , in which the visual, haptic and digital combine in a spatialized representation encoding both risk and safety. Such posthuman or transhuman sensoriality is unlikely to diminish when lockdowns are relaxed. In Melbourne, the state government's 'roadmap' out of lockdown and towards 'Covid Normal' included requirements for commercial premises to keep records of all customers for contact tracing purposes. Initially, this could be done by having customers write their name in a book with a pen. In holding the pen, previous visitors' fingers seemed to leave a film of sweat or dirt on the pen-an abject trace of the potentially infected other. QR codes quickly replaced pen and paper: individuals scanning themselves into a network of codes stretching across the city landscape in an inversion of or indifference to past concerns about Big Data or digital capitalism. In the atmosphere generated by colour-coded dots in a landscape of infection and by the uploading and downloading of locative code, the pandemic is prompting 'new practices of urban environmental citizenship and ways of life that emerge across human and morethan-human urban entanglements' (Gabrys 2014: 45) . Machinic sense becomes ever more intertwined with humanist processes of meaning-making and offers a plurality of physical and virtual 'persuasion architectures' (Kindynis 2019) fostering affective attachments to underpin interpretations of (public or personal) risk and safety and of compliance with or contravention of the law. In his novel If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, Jon McGregor describes the moment during every night-time when a city is as close to empty, or silent, or stationary, as it will ever be: Secretly, there is always this moment, an unexpected pause, a hesitation as one day is left behind and a new one begins…. We are in that moment now, there is silence and the whole city is still. (McKerrow 2020: 4) But the stillness and emptiness of the locked-down city does not evoke the quiet of the night-time before another busy day. Instead, the city seems frozen, as though lockdown has stopped time and transformed space: 'Quarantine is a geography of what doesn't happen: of canceled events, of missed chances' (Vannini 2020: 270) . Victoria is in a 'deep freeze' (Towell 2020) ; Melbourne has 'gone to sleep' (Hope 2020) ; 'the buildings and streets [are] dead, like the set of an eerie science-fiction film about the end of the world, but this time it's real' (Carroll 2020) . Foucault, writing of life in a time of plague and anti-plague measures, comments that people are compelled to exist in 'segmented, immobile, frozen space… fixed… in place ' (1977: 195, quoted in Brown 18 Twenty-four hours later, the person tweeted: 'this very exciting state of affairs only lasted 1 day…'. That spatialized maps of infection rates rapidly change should not surprise: Kitchin and Doge counsel that 'maps are transitory and fleeting, being contingent, relational and context-dependent' (Kitchin and Doge 2007: 335) . 2020: 1). The locked-down city is the spatialization of a system that has ground to a halt: the mobilities, commerce, consumerism and 'busy-ness' of daily lives grinding to an apparent halt. As the city slows down, it feels 'wrong'. Headlines such as 'It's eerie' (Butt and Turbet 2020) and 'Motionless Melbourne' (Carroll 2020) warn us about loss, depletion, abandonment and disaster. 'Everyday life began to unravel', writes Supski (2020) and, for Sinclair, '[p]laces where I could once melt into the crowd… are eerie in their emptiness' (Sinclair 2020). During the pandemic, locked-down cities were frequently named as ghost towns, the label given to once-flourishing but now-deserted urban locations 'The city centre is a ghost town with workers staying home', said Australia's Sunrise morning television show (6 July 2020); and, in Britain, the absence of tourists meant that cities 'from Edinburgh to Bath' were labelled ghost towns (Osborne 2020) . Sensing the ghostliness of the pandemic city was symptomatic of the anxieties of the pandemic: 'every day new numbers, new spectral fears, new hauntings hidden somewhere else, revealing themselves somewhere else…' (Vannini 2020: 271) . Part of the anxiety that names a city as a ghost town is the question of who, and where, are its ghosts. During lockdown, everything seems diminished: less noise, no theatre, no live music and fewer people with employment. But as became clear while undertaking this research, little in the city's architecture or infrastructure changed in lockdown. What did change is the way people use the city; with that change, our sense of the city as a whole, and of our place within it, has been transformed. As Moran puts it: Empty cities are compelling because they bear the traces of our lives as inescapably social beings. Their silence speaks of the need for human connection. Absence makes visible what we usually fail to notice. (Moran 2020: unpaginated) For several months, what has been noticed is diminution, emptiness and absence. To recall the words of Moran: 'Empty cities are compelling because… [a] bsence makes visible what we usually fail to notice' (Moran 2020: unpaginated) (my emphasis). Before lockdown, what we failed to notice was the city itself. The emptiness of urban spaces allows us to, first, notice the absence of people or noise, and, second, to notice the city itself. The withdrawal of the crowds of commuters, workers and tourists shows us streetscapes and cityscapes in a way that we have never seen before. If the city has been a 'flickering presence' (Hayward 2004: 87) in criminological thinking-as if in a scene in an old movie, monochrome, unsteady, slightly out of focus-lockdown brings it into sharp focus. It is a moment that is unlikely to last for long, and it offers the opportunity to consider the locked-down city less as a monument to something vanished and more as a vivid sensory environment in the present tense of the moment before its reoccupation. During this moment, however long it lasts, there is the possibility of the city's reimagination. In reimagining the city, there are aspects of lockdown that should not be forgotten and which might be crucial in developing 'new sensory registers' that might foster 'geographies of kindness and compassion' in urban spaces (Thrift 2005: 147) . Lockeddown cities have produced new and nomadic forms of corporeal engagement and sociality. During lockdown in Melbourne, schools were closed and playgrounds barred to children (by taping up or chaining off equipment). People placed teddy bears or other toys in their windows for neighbourhood children to look out for when walking in the street, creating an ever-expanding 'bear hunt'-a small, or 'minor', form of play improvised within a community at a time when parents were confronted with the demands of simultaneously carrying out parenting duties, homeschooling and their own work commitments. 19 Inverting the politics of suspicion that has been said to characterize the Neighbourhood Watch movement (Moores 2017; Lub 2018) , informal local groups motivated by a politics of compassion emerged during the pandemic. Neighbours shared phone numbers to form group chats on WhatsApp or Facebook, pledging to assist anyone who became ill or had to self-isolate. 20 Citizens learned how to smile while wearing a mask by crinkling their eyes and stopped to chat with others while taking their allocated one hour per day of exercise. During the 'hard lockdown' of nine public housing towers in July, once it was known that government-organized deliveries to residents were slow and scanty, food, toys and toiletries were collected, sorted and delivered by individuals all over the city. An artist made posters showing semiabstract figures embracing, with the caption 'together soon enough', as encouragement to adhere to restrictions on seeing friends and family. Acres of green space were suddenly available to people for exercise or picnics thanks to the closure in lockdown of private golf clubs. After an initial attempt to lock people out, the padlocks on gates were left unlocked, removing the possibility of arrest for trespass and converting 'golf club' into 'parkland'. 21 These itinerant, ephemeral and improvised networks, actions and agents may well be as important to urban futures after the pandemic as governmental public health policies and the emergency powers created to enforce them. Minor encounters arising from a prosocial sense of place and possibility create new spatialities and sensibilities: placing a teddy bear in a window instead of leaving it on a child's bed acknowledges community and connects the inhabitants of one house with individuals passing by in the public space of the street. It makes a child's toy into an affective knot that briefly ties together previously disconnected subjects. When this connective moment is multiplied many times over, as has happened throughout locked-down cities, we can 'invent new [spatialities] , which, in turn, can help us to repopulate cities' (Amin and Thrift 2002: 4) . How might criminology repopulate the city of the post-lockdown future? Reimagination of the city for criminology includes the opportunity to leave behind the limits identified by Hayward-a focus on crime without attending to its locations or on spatially situated crime control without including human subjects (Hayward 2004: 87) . While these tendencies have in the past constrained criminological engagement with urban environments-constituting, as it were, criminological 'city limits'-then the pandemic invites us to develop a less bounded account of the city. First, since the spatial imperatives of lockdown directives are intrinsically locative, criminology can enhance its understanding of how a sense of place functions in crime, justice and urban space. Second, the 'emptiness' of the city under lockdown encourages the sharpening of a criminological sense of the senses. The disruptions of lockdown engender sensory trauma 19 Some added to this the practice of making wooden spoons into model figures with hand-drawn faces and scraps of fabric for clothing. Little groups of these were pressed upright into the soil in parks and under trees, creating neighbourhood 'spoonvilles'. 20 An Australian initiative, The Kindness Pandemic, collates and shares anecdotes about acts of kindness during lockdown, particularly what it calls 'intersectional kindness' or empathy that acknowledges social marginality and disadvantage: https:// www.thekindnesspandemic.org. 21 After the reopening of golf clubs with the advent of 'Covid Normal', some agreed to retain a percentage of their grassland for public use. and pain, but it is possible 'to see cities as oceans of hurt resulting from the undertow of the small battles of everyday life, but also as reservoirs of hope resulting from a generalized desire for a better future' (Thrift 2005: 147) . Meaning comes through the senses: future urban criminological thinking must consider ways in which urban subjects are both sensorially susceptible to regulation and capable of its subversion. 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