Mapping the COVID-19 Spatial Behaviors and Narratives of Women in an Architecture School in the Midwest USA

The COVID-19 crisis significantly shifted our regular behavior patterns and reflected on our relationships with people and other built environment elements. This chapter describes these spatial stories inside our domestic spaces from the perspective of six female architecture students. They made mappings of their everyday activities from mid-March until the end of 2020 of COVID quarantine. They created plan drawings, diagrams, collages, and other visuals and narratives that explain how their spatial activities transformed throughout these quarantined times inside their domestic spaces as well as seasonal changes from the spring to the winter months. These future architects came from diverse backgrounds; all attend the School of Architecture and Urban Planning (SARUP) at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM). They worked on these spatial documentations as part of class assignments in designing and planning built environments where they mapped their observations, behavior patterns, and actions during this pandemic. Despite the difference in their life circumstances and spatial conditions, their emotions often intersected at several common points through pandemic anxieties, displacement, social isolation, maintaining physical distances, and lack of personal boundaries. A common point of their narratives describes their agency to feel better by coming in close contact with nature by going out for a walk regularly or adding house plants and pet animals as part of their everyday living. Their spatial documentation also mentioned the physical presence of at least one family member, relationship partner, or close friend in their spatial territories to whom they could easily connect and find solace from pandemic anxieties. All participants also described feeling better and adjusting to the norms of physical distances and social isolation along with the pandemic, from the Spring to the Fall months. The participants analyzed and explained their regular spatial activities and emotions and their spatial strategies to release their pandemic anxieties to meet the larger research question of this research: how has the COVID-2019 pandemic influenced women’s everyday socio-spatial activities and their perceptions towards the surrounding built environment?.