A new editorial team, a new tradition. With each issue, we wish to invoke thoughts and discussion with the use of an image. What are the meanings that are embedded in the image? What meanings could be encoded onto an image? This first image for this new tradition in Leisure Sciences depicts what might be a Monday morning commute in Washington D.C. A commute that is loud, aggressive, and ego-driven, which is what makes the scene above so astounding. As opposed to a welcome sense of calm, to find D.C.’s streets empty on a Monday morning is to feel a palpable sense of dread. Yet something’s missing ().
Figure 1. Photo by dmbosstone @ Flickr, taken April 20, 2020. Creative Commons 2.0.
Dunlap: Among the many things missing from the image above, perhaps most conspicuous of all is the vacancy of leadership and information that is meant to emanate from seat of government. As Americans struggled to secure the basics, they also struggled more profoundly to secure credible information about a virus that inexplicably killed some while leaving others unharmed. Even while passing temporary unemployment relief, the nation’s leadership was unable to provide a coherent stream of information to assist the public as it navigated an utterly foreign social landscape, and in the absence of such clear direction and leadership, information about the virus quickly became partisan and therefore less effective. Yet, even as leadership dithered and public life receded, opportunities for leisure emerged like dandelions in the space left by workday commutes. Spurred by public space advocacy across the country, many communities closed some streets to auto traffic thereby opening them to strollers, skateboards, bicycles, and feet. For those with the time and support to take advantage of these closures, a playful new world awaited. Nothing quite compares to the feeling of license one has while walking down the middle of a city street when such a stroll would be a death sentence under different circumstances.
Harmon: Edward T. Hall (1983) said that, “Time and space are inevitably functionally interrelated” (p. 69). But here we see a now-empty space, people deprived of their ability to use their time as they had grown accustom to doing so. It is almost impossible to never run into anyone in a midsize or larger city, and I guess that is why people move there: to never feel alone. But with the pandemic came empty streets due to “stay at home” orders; people were out of work by the millions; businesses had been closed down; and life as we knew it had been upended. With an international fog of uncertainty hovering over our collective heads, the whole world was now faced with a glut of “free time” and few places to spend it. Nicolas Berdyaev (1938/2009) said that existential philosophy “interprets the problem of time as that of human destiny” (p. 97). But here we find ourselves, nearly one year into a global standstill, acknowledging the omnipresence of time in our lives, yet powerless to control it as we always thought we could.
Mowatt: The renowned sociologist, Henri Lefebvre (1974/1991), who articulated criticisms of space and the right to cities in regard to the relationship between space and capitalism, stated that it was the “total occupation of all pre-existing space and upon the production of new space” (p. 326). “Our” streets (such as this one), parks, plazas, playgrounds, trails, residencies, and businesses are nothing more than sanitized expressions of the colonial settled upon the native. The erasure continuously occurs in our everyday practices within these streets and spaces. The absence of people and the halting of the bustle fostered during both the quarantine of COVID-19 and the threat of civil unrest due to state violence negates the effects of the benign normal and makes the occupation and production more apparent. The capital, the metropolis, the Gotham, and “the big city” are all simply settler cities that continue their ways of dispossession and extraction in secluded board rooms, alleyways, and side streets. The absence of the “busy” is a revelation of the possibilities of what else could be built upon this canvas of Whiteness, a new form of the colonial, for Whiteness in all its awesome power is only the blank space where a theft has occurred.
If only for a few months, the experience of reclaiming a city street carries a palpable sense of breaking the rules and the feeling that we are now allowed to “play” a game that had been previously “off limits.” Such an experience is no consolation for the lives lost and ruined by a pandemic, but we should revel in our “stolen” leisure and occupation of public space where and when we can and carry those moments forward so that we can literally and metaphorically take back more time and space in the future.
Department of American Studies & Geography, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA
[email protected]
Rudy Dunlap
Department of Health and Human Performance, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, TN, USA
Justin Harmon
Department of Community and Therapeutic Recreation, University of North Carolina Greensboro, Greensboro, NC, USA