Coping with Deceleration: Cities, Mobility, and Temporal Politics in the Time of COVID-19 Pandemic
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Abstract
This paper examines the deceleration process caused by the spread of COVID-19 and the lockdown measurements that affected changes in Chiang Mai, a tourist city, and Mae Sot, a border town. It analyzes the effects on flows of capital, consumption, and production crucial to service sectors in Chiang Mai and an industrial sector in Mae Sot through the politics of time. Central to the paper is how the measurement of the pandemic reflects the tension between different temporal regimes, particularly the bureaucratic time and people’s time. Such strained relationships circumscribed the process of assisting people to survive the hard time and became the factor that contributed to the distinctive experiences of suspension and inequality of temporality among large-scale capitalists, small-scale ones, migrants, and non-Thai others. In this context, enduring time has different meanings among different groups of people defined by classes and nationalities, despite the fact that these different groups of people have all played vital roles in sustaining the lives of the cities.
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