From Covid to crisis: Mobilising learnings about responses in unequal cities
Date: 3/24/2025
Time: 2:30 PM – 3:50 PM
Room: 330A, Level 3, Huntington Place
Type: Panel – Hybrid/Streamed
Theme: Making Spaces of Possibility
Organizer(s):
Melanie Lombard University of Sheffield
Chair(s):
Carolyn Prouse, Queen’s University
Description:
The Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated existing inequalities in cities around the world. Nearly 5 years on, a multiplicity of studies from science, social science and humanities disciplines have deepened understandings of the urban effects of the pandemic and responses to this. However, a willingness to return to ‘business as usual’ risks losing valuable learning based on this experience. Hopes for transformative urban change following the emergency phase of the pandemic are increasingly elusive. Moreover, for many urban citizens around the world, the pandemic was not the most significant crisis, occurring as it did amid everyday crises of poverty, inadequate infrastructure and hunger. Meanwhile, recent research has shown how local, embedded practices remain critical to urban crisis response (Anciano and Lombard 2024).
This panel session aims to build on learnings from three projects funded by the Urban Studies Foundation’s Pandemics and Cities grant, undertaken in 2022-23, in order to consider spaces of possibility in post-pandemic cities. The projects all sought to gain deeper understanding of the social, political, economic, cultural and/or environmental dimensions of pandemics on urban lives and places. Panel members will briefly reflect on findings from three projects which explored how private firms are re-making urban wastewater surveillance into a frontier of accumulation (PIs: Arefin, Prouse, and Wittmer); how municipal governments and civil society have sought to alleviate the impacts of COVID-19 by forging new partnerships (PIs: Keil, Ren, and Harrison); and how community-based organizations have responded to pandemic measures to foster resilience in unequal cities (PIs: Lombard, Anciano, and Tobar). Panel members will discuss how findings across these three areas have led to new thinking about the nature of urban crisis in unequal cities, and the possibilities for mobilising learnings in order to foster post-pandemic spaces of possibility.
References
ANCIANO, F. & LOMBARD, M. (2024) Hybridising governance for resilience in a time of crisis: learning from community-based organisations in Cape Town and Cali. International Development Planning Review, 0, 1-23. https://doi.org/10.3828/idpr.2024.15
Presentations:
Panelist: Fiona Anciano
Panelist : Carolyn Prouse (Queen’s University)
Panelist : Graeme Gotz (University of Witwatersrand)
Panelist : Josie Wittmer (Memorial University of Newfoundland)
Panelist : Melanie Lombard (University of Sheffield)
Discussant : Wangui Kimari