As I am working through final revisions of this typescript, a global pandemic continues to spread around the world. Any analyses of how this will change urban studies, the way we conduct urban research or frame space itself feel grossly premature at the moment. Yet, the scope and gravity of the pandemic also warrants some acknowledgement, knowing that the world is somehow irrevocably changed.

One question directly related to this book is the nature of comparison in the context of travel restrictions. I wonder to what extent the art spaces discussed here, so connected through their work to other places, nearby cities or faraway countries, will adapt, recover or forever change their practices. It is difficult to revisit the idea of an art space as a ship that one curator envisioned for their self-contained, mobile art space and not picture the many cruise ships that have served as deadly incubators during the pandemic. The threat these cruise ships posed to everyone on board, the number of places resistant to offering them safe harbour, and the people who were taken ill – the cruise ship has become a menacing symbol as of late and it seems unlikely that it would still be an attractive association today. Indeed, reading about these art spaces and their constant reference to elsewhere might now be tinged with a new sense of apprehension.

The control of the pandemic has relied on official public responses, and countries have wielded borders and shutdowns to varying effects. Rather than functioning as an equalizer, the virus has shown just how different we are. The difference is evident in the mortality rates affecting essential workers, along lines of class and race, based on population density and likely more cross-cutting correlations yet to be determined. The difference is also evident between countries, in terms of policy, politics, discourse and perception. Places ‘elsewhere’ are seen as backwards, authoritarian, untrustworthy, inept, prioritizing profits over people or altogether inhumane. Concurrently, these elsewheres are also rendered increasingly distant, different and incommensurate. Despite the shared genetic makeup of the virus, its embodied experience in the world has facilitated disconnection, not only physically.