RE-CONSTRUCTING BELONGING: A Community Response to COVID-19
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.11157/sites-id469Keywords:
Key words, Belonging, neighbourhood, photography, suburbs, Covid 19Abstract
This paper explores the impact of COVID-19 on belonging in a provincial Aotearoa-New Zealand town during lockdown. Drawing on the observation of suburban neighbourhood practices, it is grounded in qualitative methods and uses the metaphors of rhizome and web to understand and describe belonging.
The advent of COVID-19 and subsequent political directives led to the 2020
lockdown, precipitating changes observed variously through inscription, inter/action within built and natural environments, embodiment, emplacement and movement, and/or gained through shared and/or common experiences.
This paper concludes that changes observed in practices demonstrated the impact of COVID-19 and lockdown on neighbourhood belonging. The prolonged period of closely-bounded containment led people to re/create, expand, deepen or maintain not only local but also national and global belonging.