This week we're focusing on pandemic urbanism. We will be examine how Covid-19, lockdown and new norms are remaking urban spaces and everyday life in the city.
I've taken inspiration from work on material cultures in cultural geography and anthropology for this lecture. I'm going to use eight everyday things or objects to provide a window on to the pandemic city.
Scroll down for recorded presentations, videos, podcasts, readings and questions to ponder.
WELCOME TO THE PANDEMIC CITY
To view captions on the YouTube videos just click on the icon that appears when you hover over the bottom of the video.
Contaminating surfaces in the pandemic city
Our first object is the button on a pedestrian crossing.
But it could equally be any object or surface that we touch in the city. Railings, trolleys, door handles, money, shopping baskets, ATM machines, packaging, taps...The list goes on and on.
In this section I introduce how everyday surfaces and objects have become part of a threatscape in the city. Touching surfaces puts us at risk of picking up or passing on the coronavirus.
And so everyday objects like the button on a pedestrian crossing provide a window into the pandemic city that helps us to reflect on how many of us have started to see the city differently.
It provides a route to examine the changing geographies of touch in the city. And how fear and anxiety about coming into contact with Covid-19 might change how we experience, use, act and move through the city.
Buttons on pedestrian crossings provide a window into the transformation of touch in the pandemic city.
Geographers have long been accused of privileging the visual and downplaying the other senses, including touch. But anxieties about the spread of coronavirus, the spatial imaginaries of transmission, and constant reminders about stopping the spread and washing hands, point to the importance of understanding the city through touch.
If you're interested in learning more about the geographies of touch this article in Geography Compass by Deborah Dixon and Elizabeth Straughan is a good starting place.
And we might build on this focus on the geographies of touch through Richard Sennett's work on cities, the body and the senses.
In a chapter on the Venice ghetto as an 'urban condom', Sennett examines how fear of touching led to the containment and isolation of the Jewish population of medieval Venice in the ghetto.
This story connects fear about the spread of disease with the construction and stigmatisation of some groups as contaminated, polluting and threatening.
The fear of touching motivates bordering practices that expel and displaces bodies constructed as impure or polluting in order to seal off the city from disease.
We will pick up some of these themes in other stories.
Questions to consider
As you think about your walk you should reflect on whether you've started to see the city differently in recent months.
How do you feel when you're out in the city?
Do you avoid touching some surfaces?
Do you notice surfaces or moments of touch in ways that you didn't before?
Are there some spaces where touching surfaces is unavoidable?
Are there changes to how these spaces are regulated or how people behave in these spaces?
Plastic promises
Our second object is the plastic disposable glove.
In the early weeks of the pandemic - as the government struggled to secure sufficient supplies of personal protective equipment to keep medical professionals and carers safe - many people started to notice more and more used plastic gloves littering the city.
Lying in gutters, verges, car parts or washed up on beaches, these discarded gloves provide a window into our next set of reflections.
Continuing with the theme of touch, I focus on the failed promises of plastic gloves. They promise ro seal us off from all that is leaky, contaminating and threatening in the world. We'll think about medical gloves as a bordering technology that seeks to enclose and protect the body.
But plastic gloves are political matter in another way. I want to think about how discarded gloves open up stories about what Gay Hawkin's (2005) has called the 'ethics of waste'.
Plastic gloves as political matter
In this story, I want to focus on how we might frame plastic gloves as political matter. Plastic gloves promise to protect us by removing us from the world.
But if we follow David Farrier's arguments we begin to understand that pulling on a plastic glove brings us into contact with other people and places.
Following the thing shows us how plastic gloves entangles us in networks of responsibility to distanced others.
And the consumption and disposal of plastic gloves is becoming part of our cultural and chemical legacy.
The discarded plastic glove demands a response. It catches us in what Gay Hawkin's has called the ethics of waste.
Everyday objects - like a discarded glove - can become political matter.
Questions to consider
The discarded plastic glove shows how a seemingly unremarkable thing, a small detail, in the city might open up into much bigger questions.
While you're doing your fieldwork during the walk look out for small details.
What methods from your fieldcraft resources could you draw on?
What are the stories to be told from a piece of trash at the side of the road?
Or signs?
Face coverings
Our third object is the face mask.
As lockdown started to ease and new rituals and norms have have emerged around wearing face coverings in public space.
The face mask opens up a number of stories.
One story picks up on a radical shift in public talk about face covering in public.
Some politicians have regularly vilified the veil, burqa and niqab and some Muslim women's practices of covering their hair and faces. And yet the same politicians are now mandating face coverings in the name of public health.
Other stories focus on how new norms and expectations are being produced around wearing face coverings in public spaces, particular indoors and where physical distancing is not possible.
We'll consider how these norms both shape new rituals, but also produce trouble when people fail to conform to these norms or follow the rules.
We'll move from these troubles in public to think about how face masks have become political objects. Face masks have become a flashpoint in political protests contesting government intervention.
The final story about masks will reflect on how face masks have become a means for projecting public versions of ourselves. They become fashion items used to manufacture social distinction and express identities, as well as spaces for articulate political messages.
Face covering as a new norm
The emergence of new norms around face masks produce an interesting swerve in public discourse about face covering, particular as politician who have vilified veiling are now mandating masks.
Claire Dwyer's research with Muslim women provides important insights into the nuanced and multiple meanings and diverse motivations for Muslim women who choose to wear veils, burqas or niqabs.
It's interesting to see how norms of face covering have rapidly shifted in the pandemic city. What remains to be seen is whether a collective experience of covering our faces in public shifts attitudes and misconceptions in the long term.
It's also important to reflect on how these norms of facial covering are constructed, how they are practised and how they are policed.
In the comic strip below you see how norms of wearing face masks - and the anticipation of entering a space where covering our faces will be expected - shape new rituals.
The comic strip is made from stills of a video recorded as we made the walk for this week. Shawn and I are walking down Princes Street and about to enter Waverley Station.
The sequence provides an insight into how new habits and rituals have taken hold. And it might provide inspiration for how you analyse habits and practices in the pandemic city.
Face covering, coughing and everyday trouble on public transport
While face coverings have quickly become a social norm in the pandemic city, this doesn't mean that everyone conforms to the rules, norms or expectations.
YouTube offers a huge archive of material that captures moments of interaction where trouble arises as norms are transgressed.
Here are a couple of examples of interactions recorded on mobile phone that capture moments where attempts are made to call out transgressions and police conformity to new social norms:
The language in this example is much more colourful in this recording from the US. But it shows trouble on a bus as a passenger challenges a man - the covidiot - for not wearing a mask.
Culture Wars
Face coverings have been a focus of trouble in other kinds of ways.
In recent months face masks have also be mobilised as a site of political controversy.
The controversies have been most pronounced in the US. While most people wear masks in public, the flashpoint has been about spaces where the government or business mandate that masks should be worn.
Refusing to wear masks has become an act of rebellion to what they see as a series of incursions on their personal liberties and ask act of resisting the emergence of a new normal.
Smaller protests have also taken place in UK cities.
Face masks and style
In this final story I introduce how face masks have quickly emerged as objects used to project public versions of ourselves.
Masks have quickly become enrolled in protected political messages. Wearing masks does not involved being muzzled or losing our voice. Political art has quickly found its way onto face masks.
Whether its in the masks worn by people taking part in Black Lives Matter protest.
Or supporting Trump on the 2020 campaign trail.
But there are also more everyday and mundane ways in which face masks are becoming part of the fashion and style.
And the choice of face covering can be understood to be. means of creating what Pierre Bourdieu could call 'distinction'. Our choice of mask can be understood as an expression of taste and a statement of our identity or values.
Questions to consider
What are your experiences of wearing face masks in the city?
Look out for the kinds of masks people are wearing?
What might their masks say about them?
Do you see any transgressions of social norms around face covering? What happens? How is non-conformity managed?
How might you document social norms during your walk?
Pavement choreographies
Our fourth object is the pavement.
The pavement (or sidewalk) - as the American planner Jane Jacobs famously taught us - is vital for understanding public life in the city.
And the pavement opens us set of stories about interaction in the pandemic city. It also leads to stories about public characters and the emergence of dead spaces.
A few months ago most of us wouldn't have paid that much attention when walking down a busy pavement and passing other people.
We'd go about the city in a habitual autopilot, distracted and paying little attention. The anthropologist Michael Taussig calls this a kind of 'peripheral vision', an automatic knowledge rather than studied contemplation.
But this habitual know-how has been disrupted.
Worries about picking up the virus, alongside rules and guidance about physically distancing have shifted our practices of walking and sharing space in the pandemic city.
What was familiar has become unfamiliar. And new pavement choreographies are taking shape.
Here's a fun example of trying to maintain 2m distance in Toronto.
The pavement ballet
You've probably noticed the strangeness and unfamiliarity of moving through pavements and streets of the pandemic city.
Who gets out of the way. And who doesn't.
You've likely witnessed or experienced swerves, arcs in trajectory, or abortive manoeuvres in order to avoid coming too close to other people.
Or moments where these moves fail. Where there's not enough space to maintain distance and people dance around each other. Or where intentions are not understood and people bump into each other.
And alongside the strangeness of moving through the pandemic city, I think we're also seeing moral judgements made about new categories of people. Runners who breathe too heavily. People walking in groups who don't make adjustments for other people on the pavement. People focusing more on their phone than their surroundings.
In a blog post for the Research on Language and Social Interaction journal, Eric Laurier, Magnus Hamann, Saul Albert and Liz Stokoe make sense of both the strangeness and the difficulty of moving about the pandemic city.
Take a look at the blog and their examples as they introduce us to how moving past one another is both more difficult and more morally charged in the pandemic city.
Public characters
The pavement might also lead us to stories about public characters.
In The Death and Life of Great America Cities, Jane Jacob's emphasises the importance public characters to public life in the city.
These familiar strangers - storekeepers, cafe and bar owners, street vendors, street performers, homeless people - are important to building trust and maintaining the social life of streets and neighbourhoods.
But as the streets change in the pandemic city - either due to lockdown or new habits of social distancing - what happens to these public characters?
How do homeless people experience the lockdown city?
What's happened to practices like panhandling or selling the Big Issue?
What's happened to street performers who entertained crowds on the Royal Mile or the Mound?
Dead spaces
And a final story about the pavements focuses on those parts of the city that have been abandoned.
Even as lockdown has eased certain parts of the city remain eerily quiet and still.
With office workers furloughed, places going out of business, and millions continuing to work from home, the pavements and pedestrianised areas in parts of the city have become zombie spaces.
Areas of offices in cities are often dead spaces on weekends and in the evenings.
But digitisation, lockdown and enforced home-working have accelerated shifts in the relations between home and work.
As Ravi Ghosh (2020) writes:
"The lockdown has stripped back many of these rituals, revealing that much of face-to-face professional life is made up of parade, gesture, formality, and convention — even if there is enjoyment to be found in the structure and atmosphere of the office. Doing more online, and crucially, from not-the-office may be a lasting result from the current changes."
The ruptures of lockdown are accelerating shifts in work that have been ushered in by digitisation and high-speed internet connections. Whether remote and home-working and 24/7 communications bring about an 'urban utopia' that Henri Lefebvre foresaw is a moot point.
But these trends are likely to stall the production of office space in cities, and leave parts of many cities as zombie spaces.
Questions to consider
What are you experiences of walking in the pandemic city?
Does is feel unfamiliar or strange? Have you learnt new rules or tactics?
What methods could you use to document and make sense of new pavement ballets in the pandemic city?
Another theme in these pavement stories points to what's might be missing.
In your fieldwork how might you grasp what's absent or missing?
Things at work
Our fifth object is roll tape.
Roll tape stands in for a range of artefacts that have proliferated in the pandemic city: signs, markings, warnings, bollards, markings, painted surfaces, hand sanitiser dispensers, perspex sheets...
And we're going to use roll tape to introduce stories about the changing visual and material cultures of the pandemic city, focusing on things at work, ordering and the reallocation of urban space.
Ordering urban life
Interboro is a New York City-based architecture, planning and research collective. In 2014 they published The Arsenal of Exclusion and Inclusion - a book that documents the policies, practices and artefacts that divide in cities.
The inventory of weapons on exclusions and inclusion points to the ways in which visual and material culture in cities - signs, lines, markers and bollards - are far from passive or incidental.
These everyday things might slip into the background of our day-to-day lives, but they do all kinds of ordering work.
They exert a kind of agency - or force - as they shape how we move through, use, interact in and feel about spaces in the city.
Signs, lines, and marker make all kinds of statements about urban space. The designate:
Who gets to be where.
Who owns the space.
How should the space be used.
Who's out of place.
Ad hoc architecture in the pandemic city
In the pandemic city we see roll tape - alongside other material artefacts - reordering urban space.
Signs, lines, marked out spaces, barriers, sheets of perspex, and temporary forms of architecture have suddenly appeared in cities to encourage us to use urban spaces in ways that are physically distanced.
These artefacts are reallocating who space in the city is for. As well as re-ordering how space should be used. They shape how we walk, queue, wait, shop, sit, pay, interact, and share space.
The ordering work performed by tape and signs encourages new norms - like keeping your distance - but as we saw in the face mask stories they can also cause trouble when people don't conform.
We're also seeing other ways in which space is being claimed though ad hoc installations and temporary architecture. For example cafes and restaurants are improvising outdoor spaces and claiming pavements.
Cities for Tomorrow
While roll tape might already be curling at the edges, the stories or reordering and reallocating urban space might be longer lived.
In Edinburgh the council's 'Spaces for People' initiative has created pop-up segregated cycle lanes, closed roads and reallocated road space to pedestrians.
In the pandemic city these reflect the need for more space for pedestrians to stay apart, as well as encouraging people to commute by foot or bike rather than by car or public transport.
But these changes point to possible new urban futures. Facing up to the climate emergency will require different ways of using and moving about cities. The reallocation of urban spaces in the pandemic city might be a blueprint for more sustainable urban futures.
Questions to consider
In what ways is the pandemic present in the visual and material cultures that you encounter during your walk?
What methods might you use to notice and understand things at work in the city?
Can you think of other things that order the pandemic city?
Mapping pandemics
The sixth object in our examination of the pandemic city is a map.
Maps lead to stories about the uneven geographies of Covid-19, and particularly how some people and places are more vulnerable to Covid-19.
Maps also introduce a longer history of mapping public health and stories of how public health and planning came together in the wake for recurring epidemics of contagious fevers - particularly outbreaks of cholera in the 19th Century - that led to the remaking of urban space and interventions to improve the conditions of the working class neighbourhoods, and indeed, the urban poor.
Mapping health inequalities
Early data from the pandemic suggests that people living in poorer parts of Scotland are twice as likely to die from Covid-19 than people living in the most affluent areas.
Mapping multiple deprivation and correlating it to the incidence of Covid-19, or Covid-19 deaths points to highly uneven experiences of good health and structural inequalities in health outcomes.
Disease, public health and remaking urban space
Historical maps of Edinburgh introduce a longer view on the pandemic city.
For example, Dr. Henry Littlejohn's Report on the Sanitary Conditions of Edinburgh that was published and presented to the town council in 1865.
The report provided a comprehensive survey of the environmental health of Edinburgh, including mapping poverty, overcrowding, vice and disease in the old town..
Littlejohn's scientific report on the old town of Edinburgh became an important document in the case for slum clearance and social reform.
Maps were documents that were enrolled in Victorian projects of remaking urban space and improving the urban poor.
Building on earlier improvements in the old town tat had included the construction of Victoria Street (1830s) and Cockburn Street (1850s), Littlejohn's report proposed driving airy streets through the slums.
Part of Littlejohn's proposals focused on the closes and wynds between Cowgate and the High Street. This area has the highest population density in Europe at the time (624 people/acre).
The proposals razed tenements and opened up closes, remaking urban space to light, ventilation and surveillances from right thinking city elites.
Questions to consider
As you walk along the Cowgate you might take a look at the street layouts, street names, plaques and dates on buildings to understand how city was remade as a result of earlier outbreaks of disease.
You might take a copy of Littlejohn's maps and try and navigate city using an old map.
You might consider the ways in which public health and the spread of Covid-19 might remake urban space in contemporary cities.
What changes in the pandemic city are temporary? What changes might be longer lasting?
Staying connected
Our seventh object is the mobile phone.
And in the pandemic city our phones draw us into stories about surveillance, apps and the gig economy, and the digital doorways that control circulation in our cities.
In Radical Technologies, Adam Greenfield argues that smartphones are the signature artefacts of our time.
He writes: 'less than a decade old, this protean object has become the universal, all-but-indispensable mediator of everyday life' (Greenfield, 2017, 9).
And in the pandemic city the ways in which the smartphone has transformed the textures of everyday life seem to have intensified.
Our phones promise a contactless world where we can shop, pay, stay connected, and study without touching anything apart from 'our glowing slabs of polycarbonate'.
But because our phones are so familiar and so convenient, we don't always slow down and reflect on the stories that we might tell through them.
Test and trace
When the NHS in Scotland released it's test and trace app, I paused briefly before downloading it.
Over the summer some of my reading had been on the rise of surveillance capitalism. But my misgivings about giving up data was trumped by wanting to stop or slow the transmission of Covid-19.
And, of course, this is one of the ways in which surveillance works. It offers the quality of 'feeling safe'. Of protecting ourselves and our loved ones.
Contact tracing has been a key method in controlling infectious diseases for a long time. Tracers are paired with people who infected to build timelines of transmission and to isolate those who may have come into contact with the infected person to reduce further spread.
Digital contract tracing apps automates this process. It does away with the labour of tracers, replacing it with bluetooth signals and the assumption that our phone it never too far away from where we are.
But perhaps we should be wary about the data and information we share.
Shoshana Zuboff's (2019) book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism argues that capitalism has shifted into a new economic order where human experience has become 'a raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction and sales'.
Surveillance capitalism examines how an economic logic has infected the digital. Big tech companies gather huge numbers of data points about their users with the core purpose for making profit.
They use our data and computational power to make predictions about, and shape, what we will do.
Zuboff argues that while we think we are using free services, what is in fact happening it that we become user and we become free to them (meaning companies like Google or Facebook).
We willingly share all kinds of information and data about that allow them to make predictions that can be exploited for commercial logic or even shape our feelings and actions in the world.
We've become data subjects. Algorithms sort and sift the information that we access online. But algorithms sort and sift us. Assessing our actions, interactions, preferences and risks.
And with our smartphones surveillance capitalism is swept out of the online world into the real world. It's there everywhere we (and our phones) go.
If you're interested in learning more about Zuboff's arguments about surveillance capitalism you could check out this documentary:
Apps and the gig economy
A second story I want to tell through the mobile phone focuses on the digital economy, and it's reliance on precarious work in the 'gig economy'.
The comings and goings of Amazon deliveries and Deliveroo cyclists has been one of the most noticeable things about lockdown.
Apps afford us a contactless existence. We can continue to shop and order food without leaving the comfort and safety of our homes.
They allow us to become enclaved in the pandemic city.
But of course, the digital economy relies of millions of precarious workers. People working on temporary contracts as independent workers with few workers rights to bring the things we've ordered from the warehouse or restaurant to our homes.
And so our phones open up stories about class, consumption and work in the pandemic city.
Who can stay at home and reduce their risks of becoming exposed to Covid-19?
Who is forced to sell their labour, and risk their health by coming into contact with 10s or 100s of people every shift?
Digital Doorways
The final story that smartphones introduce focuses on access.
Getting around and getting by in the pandemic city requires contactless technology.
Paying for the bus, buying our shopping, accessing certain buildings, checking-in so we can be traced, all rely on contactless technology and usually our phones.
As we move through the pandemic city we are constantly passing through digital gateways that control circulation and access.
But not everyone has access to a smartphone (or cards with RFID chips). While many of us barely notice we're passing through digital doorway, others are exlcuded.
Questions to consider
How do you use your mobile phone in the pandemic city?
Can you imagine getting by in the city without your smartphone?
You might start recording every time you use your phone or contactless technology during your walk.
What kinds of ordinary tasks now rely on contactless technology?
What happens if people don't have a smartphone or contactless payment cards? What kinds of interactions or difficulties does this produced?
Hope
The eighth, and final, object is a gift of runner beans.
These beans were grown by neighbours in the raised bed that stands in the small garden outside our flat.
This gift introduces stories of help, kindness, neighbourliness, friendship, appreciation and hope in the pandemic city.
The pandemic has certainly been uncertain, scary, traumatic and unsettling. But in the darkness or despair there are also millions of examples of people stepping up in a moment crisis.
In the pandemic city there's greater recognition of how we are all connected.
Solidarities have been made through a sense that all in this together. Solidarities that take the shape of rainbows posted in windows or a collective following of rules.
Life in the pandemic city has seen a rethinking of what's important.
We've witnessed the public appreciation of healthcare workers and carers.
And tired excuses that nothing can change have melted away. New worlds are possible
And so our final object points to the many acts that have brought people together and made them feel like part of a community.
Whether it is looking out for friends and neighbours.
Or volunteering.
And making donations.
Rebecca Solnit (2016, 56) sees these everyday acts as a kind of heroism that reflect 'a selfless state of being and a willingness to do'.
And while the pandemic has upended lives there is, to borrow the title of Solnit's book, hope in the dark.
More recently Solnit has urged us to recognise that things were not fine before the pandemic struck. We should not year to return to things as they were. She writes:
'Ordinary life before the pandemic was already a catastrophe of desperation and exclusion for too many human beings, an environmental and climate catastrophe, an obscenity of inequality. It is too soon to know what will emerge from this emergency, but not too soon to start looking for chances to help decide it.' (Solnit 2020).
Questions to consider
How might you seek out moments or traces of hope and solidarity in the pandemic city?
Where would you look?
What would you salvage from the ruins of the pandemic city to build more just and equitable cities?