A year into the pandemic: Shifts, improvisations and impacts for places, people and policy

Abstract

This chapter provides an overarching framework for exploring the relationships between people, place and policy and living with the COVID-19 pandemic. It recognises that these three Ps are interdependent; people are embedded in places and local and national policy is developed and applied to places. The chapter starts by exploring the debate on risk societies, non-calculable uncertainty, and the emergence of Jenga capitalism as a precursor for exploring the impacts of Covid-19. It then explores the relationship between globalisation and disease, before outlining national responses to COVID-19, including the emergence of socially distanced economies. The chapter also considers some dimensions of life after the pandemic, including a discussion of the impacts on policy and taxation. In so doing, the Chapter highlights Covid-19 as a cultural inflection point. The Chapter concludes by providing an outline of the contributions to the edited collection of the same name, to which this chapter forms the introduction.