Journaling the COVID‐19 pandemic: Locality, scale, and spatialised bodies

Tracing memories and meanings of festival landscapes during the COVID-19 pandemic

COVID-19 has deeply affected mass gatherings and travel and, in the process, has transformed festivals, festival landscapes, and people's sense of place in relation to such events. In this article we argue that it is important to better understand how people's memories of festival landscapes are affected by these larger shifts. We worked from the premise that information-rich cases could provide some initial insights in this respect. To that end, we interviewed seven individuals who are regular and longstanding in their engagement with festivals in one place, lutruwita/Tasmania, the island state of Australia. Key findings suggest that pandemic experiences mediate the range of meanings participants give to festival landscapes and their interpretations of such landscapes can be described as attachments and detachments, encounters, and reorientations. We conclude by proposing that participants' efforts to draw on memories, reflect on emotional geographies, and recast autobiographies help them adjust to crises, rethink their ways of moving to and from festival sites, and reframe their sense of place in relation to significant cultural events. Such insights have application beyond both the island state and the participants involved.

Modelling changing patterns in the COVID‐19 geographical distribution: Madrid’s case

We analyse the transmission factors shaping the spatial distribution of COVID‐19 infections during the distinct phases of the pandemic’s first wave in Madrid, Spain, by fitting a spatial regression model capturing neighbourhood effects between municipalities. Our findings highlight that factors such as population, mobility, and tourism were instrumental in the days before the national lockdown. As a result, already in the early part of the lockdown phase, a geographical pattern emerged in the spread of the disease, along with the positive (negative) impact of age (wealth) on virus transmission. Thereafter, spatial links between municipalities weakened, as the influences of mobility and tourism were eroded by mass quarantine. However, in the de‐escalation phase, mobility reappeared, reinforcing the geographical pattern, an issue that policymakers must pay heed to. Indeed, a counterfactual analysis shows that the number of infections without the lockdown would have been around 170% higher.