Dwelling in times of crisis: Utopias and dystopias at work in lockdown

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France, 17th March 2020, the public authorities urged the people to stay at home in a nationwide lockdown (confinement) in order to contain the spread of the Coronavirus. The redistribution of spatiality, which is restricted to the walls of their home throughout the public health crisis, gives rise to epistemological questions.How can geographers take part in the scientific debates to analyze the social, cultural, spatial and territorial consequences of this pandemic? This article undertakes an analysis of the input of an “inner geography” that is defined as a socio-anthropology of the concept of inhabiting. The accounts of the lockdown experience, relayed in a viral way by the social network, exemplify the essence of the spatial inequity as regards people’s succeeding or not in creating their own cosmogonical tales behind closed doors. In other words, at a time when everyone is somehow working on domesticating their “inhabiting/dwelling apparatuses/machines” that is to say they own accommodation, the fact of confining/shutting geography away would consist in developing some micro-geopolitics whose purpose would be to identify the causes of this spatial inequity. These factors are sometimes staged through improper dialectics in order not only to fight but also to put an end to the myth of modernity based on the estrangement of Man with his Environment.