ABSTRACT
Thresholds, as spatial arrangements, reveal qualities of the relationship between the private and the public and between the interior and the exterior. If spaces are potentially thresholds that reveal encounters between different groups and ways of life, then this is due to the dialectical relationship between the boundary and the bridge. The ‘established’ notion of public space is currently being lost, and it is necessary to rethink the boundary between the private and the public. Urban space is composed of physical and electronic forms, such as virtual reality devices, which underline the parallel existence of an intangible world of information and possibilities. Everyday life is directed and reshaped by the power of technology, while ‘home’ can be anywhere humans reside, live or travel. The integration of new technology changes the perception of public space by isolating and creating a private sphere within it. Presently, the new coronavirus crisis has deregulated the concept of order within a city, penetrated our daily lives, and transformed the perception of the embodied experience. This chapter, after acknowledging the dual nature of the (contemporary) threshold and its offshoots, first considers whether the notion of a dynamic boundary between public and private space can be renegotiated in the age of pandemic and enclosures. At the same time, it looks for the contemporary thresholds of the pandemic and its contribution to the formation of a new relationship among individual, public, and private spaces.
