The Museum of Moscow conference on strange times

Going to the Country: Mobility and Space in the Time of a Pandemic

Dace Dzenovska, University of Oxford

Flight from cities in time of a pandemic is hardly new. As in The Decameron or The Plague, some people leave the city looking for shelter, others are stuck in it. Today, the return to the country – or of the country – has received enthusiastic endorsement from some middle-class observers who hope that neglected or forgotten rural areas might be revived as a welcome side-effect of the pandemic. However, prevailing interpretations of COVID-related migration to the countryside tend to be too linear and are too quick to assume permanence. Instead, they should be viewed as part of multi-scalar and multi-local mobility tactics of a global middle class that finds itself living in a world where the future appears as a threat to the present, not an improvement upon it. 

See the panel at 5:11:00