This open access reading list < https://bit.ly/pandemicurbanism> is a result of the collective effort of PhD and Masters students in the Urban Planning program at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University. The aim of the list is to provide a collection of materials that address the pandemic as it relates to urbanism, urban planning, architecture, and the built environment. The material presented here is being collected, organized and summarized over the months of March and April 2020 as we witnessed our lives transformed by the COVID 19 crisis, especially in New York City, a city many of us call home and a place that has become one of the main hotspots for the spread of the infectious disease that so far has killed more than 15,000 people (as of April 22). Our hope that this list will be useful in bringing together -in one document- materials that students and scholars will find useful to think about the pandemic as it relates to urbanization. We also hope that this document will become a “living document” that people can take the liberty to update with relevant entries in the spirit of providing a collective resource for people across the globe interested in the implications of COVID-19 for our built environment (instructions to add entries are at the bottom of the document).

Based on our research characterizing New York City (NYC)’s pandemic urbanism by exploring its new sidewalk ballet, this chapter ponders the future of NYC after the COVID-19 pandemic. We focused on this sidewalk ballet to capture the experience of being in the city during the first year of the pandemic and analysed changes to the sidewalk and urban lifestyle using a novel method of remote ethnography. The research combined the use of Zoom video conferencing and a GPS tracking application on smartphones to interview participants as they walked the city, which facilitated traversing it remotely without physically being there. After analysing the resulting three layers of data sets, derived from transcript, video, and location, we identified recurring themes and developed an online interface to plot the interview content and thematic markers on a geospatial map. Revisiting our findings more than a year later, this chapter observes the changes to the sidewalk and the urban lifestyle that we identified and considers which of them were temporary and have vanished with time and which are here to stay. This raises the question of whether the changes that defined NYC’s pandemic urbanism have fundamentally changed the way we plan, use, and think about our cities.

[PT] Este texto (entenda-se, sem pretenções acadêmico-científicas), desenvolvido em abril de 2020, início da pandemia da Covid19 no Brasil e em boa parte do mundo, e sintetiza algumas reflexões minhas e do amigo Bruno Padovano (USP, Brasil), no qual, com as nossas respectivas visões de mundo e de geografia (eu, agnóstico, recluso no Nordeste, e Bruno, católico, de quarentena em São Paulo), tentamos trazer um olhar um pouco mais otimista de futuro, dentro de um cenário tão tenso e triste no mundo. Na realidade, esse texto foi uma oportunidade de reflexão conjunta, on-line e por telefone, sobre novas possibilidades de atuação (pesquisa e projetos) em nosso campo profissional durante e pós-pandemia. [EN] This text (understood, without academic-scientific pretensions), developed in April 2020, the beginning of the Covid19 pandemic in Brazil and in a good part of the world, and synthesizes some reflections of me and my friend Bruno Padovano (USP, Brazil), in which, with our respective views of the world and geography (I, agnostic, inmate in the Northeast, and Bruno, Catholic, quarantined in São Paulo), we try to bring a slightly more optimistic look to the future, within such a scenario tense and sad in the world. In reality, this text was an opportunity for joint reflection, online and by phone, on new possibilities for action (research and projects) in our professional field during and after the pandemic. ISSN - 2525-6009

This article deals with the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic from the perspective of inhabitants of two neighborhoods in the City of Buenos Aires, Argentina. In this framework, it dwells on the changes, adaptations, and redefinitions that the pandemic context imposed on daily life at its interface with the territory. It pays special attention to the experience of preventive and compulsory social isolation and its impacts on neighborhood sociability. The analysis is based on the assumption that the pandemic, although global in nature, has effects and meanings with a local anchor, emphasizing its situated nature. Effects and meanings are read in articulation with the adaptation practices carried out by citizens. The methodological strategy on which the work is based is qualitative, 11 in-depth interviews were carried out with residents of the Lugano and San Telmo neighborhoods of the City of Buenos Aires, in the month of July 2021. The main findings have to do with the individual and collective adaptation strategies that are configured in the pandemic context to support daily life.

Globalization, tourism, virtuality, climate change, and the explosive growth of cities have generated a wide range of stressors, pollutants, and toxins that have been ravaging populations. This, coupled with viral, bacterial, and other pandemics, is rapidly creating a new reality that requires public health factors to be integrated more thoroughly into the planning and design of city regions. This prompts a questioning of the role and form of city centers as well as the distribution of people and activities in city regions. This goes beyond more outdoor spaces, places, and activities and new criteria for indoor events. Moreover, public transport, mobility, and infrastructure in general need to be retooled to deal with these emergent circumstances.

The Covid 19 crisis has shown the profound spatial nature and implications of pandemics, urging planners and urbanists to revive old debates and instruct reflections upon emerging issues. By relying on early scientific literature, grey literature and anecdotal evidence drawing on news reports, this contribution identifies and discusses some broad issues in relation to the spatial and scalar factors and implications of the pandemic and the response to it: the socio-spatial features of its spread, the crisis of the urban development models based on the experiential economy and commuting metropolisation, the emergence of a new balance between relocalisation and dematerialised connectivity, the wider socio-spatial effects of the spread of remote work. In conclusion, the paper offers some initial insights on relevant research issues for spatial planners and urbanists. Guardando attraverso (e oltre) un fatto territoriale totale. Qualche nota sui fatti e gli effetti socio-spaziali della pandemia e qualche idea per la ricerca e il dibattito.

This call opens a space for discussion on issues linked to the exceptional and ongoing experience of the pandemic: on its human, psychological, political-institutional, legal, social, economic, ideological, and ideal repercussions. All these aspects are intertwined with the plots that "narrate" our experiences. How does the experience of these days affect our conscience? What are the words and the ideas through which we believe to be able to express this experience? What problems arise within the organisational models we live in, and how do they affect the habits that almost as a second nature regulate our daily lives? How can we profoundly revise the entire system that governs our behaviour, rights and duties, and why should we? At present, the "narration" of the human condition finds tonal extensions, ranging from the elaboration of individual and collective pain to the complex representation of increasing problems. Moreover, it largely involves social strata and generations, from the elderly to young children. Different languages, which are technical and scientific, coldly statistical, poignantly painful yet extraordinarily human, seem to work side by side to create a perception of solidarity and compact unity, despite the difficulty of making controversial choices. The-textual, visual and acoustic-media that convey them simultaneously "contaminate" them. The war against the enemy is too demanding to face the challenges of "dialogue" in order to enhance the performative content of diversity. We now limit ourselves to adopt irrelevant, "common" words derived from an "ancient", acquired culture (in its widest range: ethic, legal, political, religious). However, the question has been raised whether the current state of exception-required by the emergency situation-is in line with the elaboration and historical development of the modern-contemporary paradigm of power: whether the "exceptional" feature of the current exercise of legislative powers and emergency decrees will promptly end, as soon as the emergency becomes less urgent, and what we believed to be democratic certainties will be restored. By contrast, a vocabulary of the crisis (or rather, of this crisis) emerges, entering the linguistic game that intersects "city" and "citizenship" with the new perception of the global that has been induced by the pandemic.

During the confinement due to COVID-19, our research group (MIRCo) gathered together to share our views on the pandemic. Like Klemperer (2001), we developed a “quarantine diary” of the “keywords” (Williams, 2015) and expressions circulating in Spain and abroad during the lockdown. In this article, we reflect on how events are (re)constructed in discourse and how different understandings emerge and turn into social practices with transforming potential (Foucault, 2002; Martin Rojo, 2001). Our analysis of these keywords reveals two tendencies, associated with neoliberal governmentality that reinforce the disciplinary component of security: (i) the reinforcement of social discipline, which in the Spanish case was call upon individual responsibility and, for the most part, was efficiently self-imposed by citizens; (ii) the multiplication of devices and nodes of social surveillance, which took place with the engagement of the population in controlling others, and the proliferation of cyber surveillance. The struggles over the signification (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985) of various keywords, such as solidarity or freedom, reveal several social tensions at different moments and places that are addressed in the article. In this article, we also turn to discourses that reflect the care practices initiated by neighborhood and activist groups in order to address the particular ways in which the pandemic has affected their communities. Exemplified by the repopularized slogan: “solo el pueblo salva al pueblo” (“only the people can save the people”), here we explore how networks of mutual aid and care at the local level challenge assumptions of the State as the primary actor for finding a way out of the crisis. Our discussion questions how “commoning” (Bollier, 2014) practices for resistance and survival might transcend the pandemic and provide keys to unlocking solutions to new (and old) social struggles.