Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the relationship between chronic illness, the human body and the built environment in the context of Covid-19 mitigations in London and the UK more broadly. How is health constructed through quotidian movement, and how are these quotidian structures affected by the pandemic?

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the relationship between the human body and the built environment in the context of Covid-19 mitigations in London and the UK more broadly. The rates of chronic illness, including type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, have been rising steadily in the UK for the last two decades. However, the experience of living through changing and often chaotic labour and lifestyle structures the last 20 months offers new challenges for social and public health scientists to unpack new biosocial complexity in combating these rising rates of chronic illness. The effects of Covid mitigation strategies within the sciences have been, so far, largely speculative, focusing on the general physical and mental health of the individual in lockdown, the absence of wider care provision during the most virulent months of the Covid-19 outbreaks, and resource limitations in overwhelmed public health systems. Following Emily Mendenhall’s (2012, 2016) calls to think ‘beyond comorbidity’, and Emily Yates Doerr recent critiques of social determinants of Health (2020), this paper reconsiders chronic illness from the perspective of an Anthropology of the body and the City in the aftermath of Covid-19 lockdowns. Such a consideration begs questions on how health is maintained and constructed through quotidian living, and asks further questions on the complexity of how these quotidian structures are affected by the pandemic. What has prohibited and permitted cardiovascular activity and hours before and during the pandemic, and what are the implications for quotidian health for future labour structures? Asking such questions, and reconsidering social determinants of health in light of lockdowns and remote living, may afford the social scientist pause in defining what exercise ‘is’, how it is done, and how it is provided by our relationship to the built environment.