In this guest post, Carolyn Prouse and Mohammed Rafi Arefin discuss the results of the workshop “From Crisis to Extended Upheavals,” where former USF grant holders shared their experiences with the “Pandemic and Cities” funding scheme, which was promoted during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the emergency phase of the COVID-19 crisis, the Urban Studies Foundation supported research investigating how COVID was transforming cities and urban life. Nearly 5 years after the WHO declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, four teams of urban researchers funded by USF’s Pandemics & Cities initiative gathered in Detroit for a one-day workshop titled “From Crisis to Extended Upheavals.”
We took aim at a tendency in academic knowledge production on infectious disease and cities, which peaks during crises and then fades, without wrestling with the aftereffects or the longue durée of such crises (Keil 2023). Indeed, research on the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath has already begun to ebb. By bringing together insights from our respective USF-funded work, we began from the premise that rather than isolated events or unprecedented departures, crises like the pandemic and the critical work spurred by such disruptions are conjunctural moments that require sustained attention and the development of concepts to wrestle with continued upheavals and slow emergencies.
We gathered in Detroit to share findings from our projects and chart a way forward for urban research in extended upheavals. While our teams shared a focus on the urban in the pandemic, we approached the crisis moment in distinct ways including studying: how municipal governments and civil society have sought to alleviate the impacts of COVID-19 by forging new partnerships in and across Chicago, Toronto, and Johannesburg; how private firms are re-making urban wastewater surveillance into a frontier of accumulation through commodification and datafiction; and how community-based organizations have responded to pandemic measures to foster resilience in unequal cities. Our discussions considered what concepts and methods could elucidate the transformations brought forth by the outbreak of the pandemic.
Hillary Birch, Graeme Gotz, Phil Harrison, Roger Keil, and Xuefei Ren opened the day, facilitating a discussion on the appropriate concepts and frameworks to make sense of crisis and extended upheavals. This conversation included a consideration of the many ways that the state, communities, and other actors deploy and experience ‘crisis’ as well as the disconnect between how the state says it governs versus the internal workings of state crisis management. Moving from concepts to methodologies, Fiona Anciano, Carlos Andres Tobar Tovar, and Melanie Lombard lead the group through a discussion of the specific methods they found viable and effective for understanding community navigations of the pandemic and stay-at-home orders. One of the many methods discussed was WhatsApp diaries, which allowed for a flexible and multi-media way for people to reflect on their experience of the crisis in South Africa. In the early afternoon, Rae Baker led a walk through the surrounding Detroit neighbourhood – the Cultural Center Historic District – to ground our discussions in the city’s complex social and spatial history. In the final closed session of the day, Mohammed Rafi Arefin, Carolyn Prouse, and Josie Wittmer facilitated a reflection on the preceding discussions to consider how the P&C research projects could complement one another for a better understanding of sustained transformations in urban life through health crises. They asked: What have we learned for the next urban pandemic crisis? And what, specifically, are the capacities and limitations of states, private firms, and communities in governing and weathering cascading urban crises? These thoughts will be published soon as a critical commentary; stay tuned for more!
The workshop culminated in a public panel titled “Cities and the infectious disease crisis: lessons from four continents” chaired and moderated by Carolyn Prouse. Panellists included: Mohammed Rafi Arefin, Fiona Anciano, Rae Baker, Roger Keil, and Wangui Kimari. The panel focused on how the COVID pandemic – and socioecological crisis more generally – create disruptions that can re-sediment or re-articulate power blocs and techno-fixes while also providing the opportunity for new ways of doing politics. We reference ‘slow emergency’ (Anderson et al, 2020) because we recognise that crisis moments are often the eruption of long-simmering forms of colonial, imperial, and capitalist contradictions that shape the crisis itself and its aftereffects.
Panellists responded to two sets of questions from the vantage point of their respective projects:
- How have infrastructure, housing, and/or urban governance been transformed through slow emergency and more immediate crisis, and what happens to tensions and contradictions in accumulation, governance, and resistance when the crisis is declared over and slow emergency remains?
- What methodologies are most useful for understanding the reconfiguration of urban politics through socio-ecological crisis? For instance, what is the value in taking ‘crisis’ as an analytic? What insights are developed through working across the North and South? And what specific methods have been useful for studying urban crisis?
For the panellists’ discussion of these questions, check out the recorded panel here.
Many thanks to the Urban Studies Foundation for making this research possible and allowing our teams to meet in person. The experience was invaluable for relationship-building amongst our groups, and we look forward to future collaborations across projects!
Projects funded under the “Cities and Pandemics” programme:
- The urban politics of wastewater-based epidemiology: transforming the relationship between waste, health, and urban governance (Drs Mohammed Rafi Arefin, Carolyn Prouse, and Josie Wittmer)
- Dispatches from the threshold: organizing for housing justice in a pandemic (Drs Rachael Baker and Eric Robsky Huntley)
- Navigating debt-trap urbanism in pandemic times: family homelessness and temporary accommodation in Greater Manchester (Professor Katherine Brickell and Dr Mel Nowicki)
- Towards resilient and liveable neighbourhoods post Covid-19: evaluating neighbourhood quality in Sydney (AUS) and Newcastle upon Tyne (UK) (Drs Ozgur Gocer, Ayse Ozbil Torun, and Seraphim Alvanides)
- The city after Covid-19: vulnerability and urban governance in Chicago, Toronto, and Johannesburg (Profs Roger Keil, Xuefei Ren, and Philip Harrison)
- Community-based social capital and economic resilience of SMEs in Iran: the role of socio-economic and built-environment characteristics of urban neighbourhoods (Drs Taimaz Larimian and Arash Sadeghi)
- From social infrastructure to pandemic resilience?: learning from and with low-income urban communities (Dr Melanie Lombard, Professor Fiona Anciano, and Dr Carlos Andres Tobar Tovar)
Works Cited:
Anderson, B., Grove, K., Rickards, L., & Kearnes, M. (2020). Slow emergencies: Temporality and the racialized biopolitics of emergency governance. Progress in Human Geography, 44(4), 621–639. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132519849263
Keil, R. (2023). Covid, contagion and comparative urban research. In J. Robinson, T. Bunnell, D. Kanai, & S. E. Baker (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of comparative global urban studies (1st ed., pp. 15). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429287961