Post‐pandemic cities: An urban lexicon of accelerations/decelerations

Abstract

COVID‐19 has stimulated renewed societal and academic debate about the future of cities and urban life. Future visons have veered from the ‘death of the city’ to visual renderings and limited experiments with novel 15 minute neighbourhoods. Within this context, we as a diverse group of urban scholars sought to examine the emergent ‘post’‐COVID city through the production of an urban lexicon that investigates its socio‐material contours. The urban lexicon makes three contributions. First, to explore how the pandemic has accelerated certain processes and agendas, while at the same time, other processes, priorities and sites have been decelerated and put on hold. Second, to utilise this framing to examine the impacts of the pandemic on how cities are governed, how urban geographies are managed and lived, and how care emerged as a vital urban resource. Third, to tease out what might be temporary intensifications and what may become configurational in urban governance, platforming, density, technosolutionism, dwelling, crowds, respatialisation, reconcentration, care, improvisation and atmosphere. The urban lexicon proposes a vocabulary for describing and understanding some of the key contours of the emergent post‐pandemic city.

Way‐finding agendas through Transactions

“…Related work we have published in and on COVID‐19 has made allied arguments about health citizenship and biological sub‐citizenship existing on a graduated spectrum of inequalities that were at once exposed and exacerbated by the pandemic, but also mediated by intersecting conjunctural conditions ranging from carcerality and ‘emergent’ vulnerability to mutuality, solidarity, and counter‐hegemonic agency (Clarke & Barnett, 2023; Herrick et al., 2022; Mould et al., 2022; Schliehe et al., 2023; Sparke & Anguelov, 2020; Van Holstein et al., 2023). Addressing such influences in relation to the post‐pandemic city, another recent contribution points, like Senanayake, to the more‐than‐human political‐ecologies that also condition bio(in)security and associated health vulnerabilities (Marvin et al., 2023).…”

The political economy of healthcare access and Chicagoland health-oriented non-profit organizations

“…The localizing of social issues and resources may require coalition creation to overcome capacity shortages by pooling resources and collectively addressing needs. This shift underlines the importance of examining the experiences of suburban communities with marginalized groups – or any geographic context “on the periphery” of an urban space (Marvin et al, 2023).…”

Density and pandemic urbanism: Exposure and networked density in Manila and Taipei

“…Not surprisingly, urban density gathered significant popular and scholarly attention over the course of the pandemic (Acuto, 2020; Boterman, 2020; Connolly et al, 2020; Joiner et al, 2022). This work is part of a larger literature on COVID-19’s impact on cities, covering four key areas (see Aalbers et al, 2020; Marvin et al, 2023; Sparke and Anguelov, 2020).…”

“…Finally, the fourth is research on the potential long-term impacts of the pandemic, including on labour patterns, housing and real estate markets, and economic change (e.g. see Florida et al, 2023; Marvin et al, 2023).…”