COVID and the Urban: tools for (long-term) crisis response
On 26 March 2021, in the middle of the UK’s third national lockdown, UCL Urban Laboratory and the Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction hosted an interdisciplinary group of speakers to draw together diverse perspectives on the ongoing COVID emergency. Researcher Melissa Weihmayer reflects on what was said.
Catch-phrases like the “new normal” crowds out meaningful discussions of the ways that social science research can mitigate the negative effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even rarer are challenges to attempts to synthesize and distill a full year’s worth of dramatic change into easily processed soundbites. The Urban Laboratory’s March 2021 event COVID and the Urban: cross-disciplinary perspectives on emergency did both.
Bringing together academics and practitioners, this event created surprising linkages between disciplines. The contributions spanned from film and music to ethnography and critical insight on data sciences. We also heard concrete examples of plans by city governments to show how theoretical concepts from urban studies translate to policy. Here I combine the panelists’ diverse interventions into four overarching themes to jumpstart UCL’s investigation into ‘Emergency Urbanism’.
1. Taking a long-term view
The concept of ‘emergency’ invokes images of a frenetic, high-pressured yet implicitly temporary situation. It justifies states of exception and a myopic focus on the problem at hand. By contrast, the panellists situated the current pandemic within longer-term trajectories of urban crisis and change. Indeed, given what we already know about the links between epidemiology, urbanisation, infrastructure, and globalisation, Simon Marvin, Professor at the University of Sheffield and Director of the Urban Institute, argued that pandemics like COVID-19 should come as no surprise. Similarly, Austin Zeiderman, Associate Professor of Geography at the London School of Economics, reminds us that even before the pandemic, many believed us to be living in a historical age of uncertainty and insecurity, marked by persistent economic crisis and political violence. Hence the global emergency we find ourselves in today is not exactly ‘unprecedented’.
This widespread experience of uncertainty and insecurity had already imprinted itself into the ways we govern and allow ourselves to be governed. Drawing from his work on housing resettlement programmes in Colombia’s urban peripheries, designed to relocate people from areas prone to natural hazards, Zeiderman compared the experience with how people are navigating the pandemic. First, it sets into motion a complex process of social transformation for the people required to move. Some argued that moving somewhere new was riskier than staying behind, akin to the balancing act of imposing seemingly harsh restrictions in the name of public health during the pandemic. Second, natural hazards are seen as only one of many risks faced, with the threat of violence constantly looming. Likewise, the pandemic does not create an isolated moment of crisis, but rather adds layers to the risks that already threaten urban life, especially for the people living at the margins of cities. Third, while the entire city may face the same risk of a natural hazard or a pandemic, the exposure to that risk and its implications are fundamentally unequal. Zeiderman described COVID-19 as a stark demonstration of the interconnectedness of risk, with one person’s behavior significantly affecting the exposure of others, and highlighted how this collective preoccupation with security and risk creates a political imperative to govern in the present to avoid future harm. With this he emphasised the need to promote action to address inequality, notwithstanding hot contestation in the political sphere as to how to do this.
While academic research routinely adopts longer-term perspectives, Mehrnaz Ghojeh, Head of City Finance Facility at C40 Cities, shared practical applications of this thinking in the present. C40 Cities is a network of mayors from the world’s largest cities that advocate for action on climate change and other new challenges like pandemic response. Proposed programmes and strategies do emphasize short-term benefits but also see the pandemic as an opportunity to make longer term investments. For example, increasing health safety of public transportation in the short-term is paired with plans to expand transport networks, and emergency food distributions will serve as a blueprint for longer-term programmes to combat food insecurity.
Ghojeh also identified a pattern amidst the mayors’ experiences in the last year: those cities that started with a stronger understanding of inequality and inequity before the pandemic were better able to reach vulnerable communities. They already had partnerships and collaborations in place to reach them at short notice. This suggests that taking seriously the ‘entanglements of risk and vulnerability’ that Zeiderman raises pays off in both the short and the long term for city managers.
2. Masking politics with numbers
Alongside the widespread appreciation of scientific advancements in vaccine production, the pandemic response has relied on scientific rationales and technologies to guide its policies. These are celebrated for being apolitical, enlightened, and cost effective. Marvin highlighted the intertwining of conventional epidemiological knowledge with technocratic expertise, but, drawing on his experience researching smart cities, he argued that, like many previous urban operating systems, their transformative potential is often overstated. For example, robots used to reduce human contact during the pandemic had limited capabilities, and the big splash they created was almost comical. Other systems overpromised and underdelivered, with the use of smart phone data hampered by significant gaps in coverage, especially of more vulnerable populations. There are then important reasons to question the use of such practices, especially if their outputs fail to improve the quality and equity of responses. A key example of ‘technocracy gone wrong’ is the surprisingly corporate application developed by the UK Government, the massive £22 billion Test and Trace platform, that was insufficiently used by the public and decision-makers alike. More insidious perhaps is the significant increase in biometric surveillance that goes unquestioned during times of ‘emergency’.
Marvin and Zeiderman both pointed to the ways in which seemingly apolitical technologies are in fact doing significant political work: “We go wrong if we assume that the intersection of State and Science is a ‘transhistorical’ and apolitical driver for decision-making,” said Marvin. Victims of the virus are entered into systems as numbers and reported in the nightly news as aggregated totals of cases and deaths. Indeed, the numbers and models create a distance between us and the real experience of the pandemic which can be counterproductive to mounting a collective and holistic response. And yet the appeals to science and technology to provide answers to ethical questions continue.
Visualising saves lives
Going beyond the numbers are the systems and guidelines that instruct and shape the behaviour of individuals in the social context. They are enabled by visuals that range from practical to highly emotive. Kasia Mika, Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University London, and Carina Fearnley, Associate Professor in Science and Technology Studies and the Director of UCL’s Warning Research Centre, both highlighted the social and cultural processes involved in learning how to care for one another in a pandemic — while presenting what seemed initially to be contrasting approaches to disaster response.
Mika’s explores the diversity of reactions to crisis through film, positioning ‘crisis as.. interpretation, not a fact’, and calling into question a fixed representation of victimhood. Her recent documentary featuring the voices of Haitian artists IntranQu’îllités transforms reductionist images of Haitian struggle into a creative process. Mika argues for creativity and artistic expression as critical sites of political intervention, not just therapeutic outlets, which bring into being new ways to deal with ongoing crisis as well as alternative modes of recovery. Recovery becomes a reconfiguration and a redress rather than a return to a pre-disaster baseline. As such, she celebrates the critical thought that art brings.
Diverse interpretations of crisis, however, pose a challenge to the disaster warning systems that Fearnley studies. Early warning systems are intended to be as simple and predictable as possible to mobilize stakeholders into action. Here, consistency between the messaging and the visuals is key; any complexity introduced could mean time and lives lost. The various systems used in the United Kingdom demonstrated this, with at least two different approaches introduced throughout the pandemic that led to confusion and even distrust, reducing compliance with guidelines.
While one emphasises diversity while the other emphasises standardization, Mika and Fearnley both demonstrated the importance of visual communication in times of crisis. Fearnley reflected on the absurdity of “colouring” COVID-19 red; the proteins on the virus’ surface do not actually have colour but red was used to promote visual attention and a sense of urgency. The best alert systems are the ones that work, and this requires knowing the context well enough to identify the visuals that will be most easily understood. Mika similarly argued that community imaginations and storytelling may well be better suited to mobilizing stakeholders than top-down policy directives, a position recapitulated by moderator Ilan Kelman, Professor of Disasters and Health at UCL’s Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction; he emphasised the nature of early warning systems as a social rather than technical process, which should be enfolded within peoples’ daily lives and livelihoods, rather than competing with them.
3. Improvising, but within limits
Even though there were many calls to prepare for a pandemic, governmental bodies at all levels simply did not know what to do. In these situations, improvisation is uncomfortable yet inevitable. As a composer and critic, Ajay Heble, Professor at the University of Guelph and Director of the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation, knows the challenges and opportunities of improvisation well. First, to improvise is to engage with states of ongoing precarity (you don’t know what the next note will be; you are literally ‘living on the edge’); second, this is thrilling but also stressful, and as such requires discipline and resilience built up over years. In other words, while improvisation may seem to come naturally, it is actually a skill honed while adhering to a set of rules. To start with you need to know what instruments you have in your band and how they work.
This process of embracing the unknown can create new paradigms for solving problems. At its best, it can even confront an unequal status quo. However, Heble reminded us that even improvisation has its limits. It involves risk-taking, and that risk may be higher for some people than others. Also, as he admitted, it doesn’t always work, or may not do enough. Indeed, the dialogue between these urbanists reminded us of the need to maintain a variety of tools in our ‘emergency response toolbox’, as no one tool can do it all: improvisation, creativity, standardization, data models, risk mitigation planning, and seasoned city managers.
Recent debates call into question the agglomeration forces bringing people to cities, even forecasting the ‘undoing’ of cities in the U.S. and Europe. Marvin warns caution. Material changes, like the downfall of cities and urbanism as we know it, takes decades, if not centuries. Ghojeh and others have shown us that cities still have a few new tricks up their sleeves for getting us through this pandemic. And let us not overlook the agility of city dwellers that bring their experience overcoming past crises to each new one on the horizon, practising disciplined improvisation every day.
Recordings of the event are available on our Vimeo channel.
Melissa Weihmayer is a PhD Candidate in Regional and Urban Planning Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research focuses on responses to displacement and migration in cities, with an interest in how evidence informs local government decision-making, and the potential that data-gathering processes have for exacerbating or mitigating inequalities between displaced populations and their non-displaced neighbours. Her interdisciplinary approach stems from a Bachelors in Anthropology and German from the University of Chicago and a Masters in International Relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.
