Beyond the Three-Act Narrative: Other Urban Lives and COVID 19

Photo by Yohann LIBOT

As any reader of this site knows, there’s been endless talk about COVID-19 and its effects on urban life. Possibilities and solutions have been discussed at a rapid clip because, by now, we have realized how vital public spaces are, how necessary it is to adapt our lives to the “new normal”, and how much our lives have effectively changed.

But there’s a key question often overlooked: whose lives are we talking about?

The dominant discourse of COVID 19 and cities seems to be built around a singular narrative, assuming the crisis has been more or less the same for different places with few variations. It establishes an ongoing story in three acts: business as usual; disruption by lock-down, which empties streets and transformed routines; and a gradual return, where we are rethinking the role of public spaces.

Yet this discourse fails to consider other street lives and urban cultures which exist in large parts of the world, and the most vulnerable populations, who are dealing with the hardest aspects of the pandemic. Due to economic and social inequalities, alternative ways of organization of everyday life in public space already took place long before the COVID-19 crisis, and for these sectors these three acts didn’t happen as neatly, if at all.

For some populations, COVID-19 measures didn’t imply a change, but rather another constraint to deal with, along with preexisting complications of street life. For others, public space was never accessible, inclusive or safe to begin with, while many already used public space for more than leisure out of preexisting needs.

The pandemic, along with lockdown measures, aggravate ongoing structural inequalities pertaining to class, race, income, and gender. We can observe this at a micro level (individuals that coexist in any given city) by focusing on women, and at a macro level, on the Global South.

Photo by Edna Peza

Women, the pandemic, and public space

In recent years, practitioners in various fields have come to understand how different the lived experience of public spaces can be for women. Security is one of the most important concerns for women across the world. Understandably, women have a very poor perception on security in public space, due to sexual remarks, touching, rape, and gender-related killings. Conditions of everyday life in public spaces — such as poor lighting, low pedestrian traffic, and walking alone — present greater risks. It goes without saying that risks are higher for disabled or racialized individuals.

In cases where lockdowns were enforced, activity on the streets dropped drastically during the day, and streets were desolate at night. Without this activity, some cities decided to turn off public lighting. Less activity also meant less commutes, which led to a temporary reduction in public transit services. For those women whose activity continued during lockdown, this represented longer distances to walk along empty and darkened streets at night.

With less activity and less customers, shops and businesses shut down, some of them permanently. What was a bustling street became a residual space overnight, and many have yet to recover even after lockdowns have been lifted. Poor lighting, lack of passive surveillance — from patrons, or customers — and a general absence of activity are factors that make for unsafe conditions for women in particular.

Whereas in many cities there has been a drop of crime rates, this has not necessarily improved women's perception of security in public space during the COVID-19 crisis. Although it has been remarked how lockdown exacerbated issues of domestic violence, the issues of insecurity and violence in public space for women has to still be addressed in forums of city making and urban analysis.

Sexual violence in public spaces didn’t stop during the crisis. Cases in Chile, UK, Canada, Nigeria, Kenya, the Philippines, India, the US, France, and Mexico have registered cases of sexual violence against women when exercising outdoors, working in public work settings, or living in the street. Traveling to and from work is particularly dangerous for essential workers. Female healthcare professionals have been harassed, verbally and physically attacked or denied access to public transportation.

For female informal workers, there is a composed risk amidst a health crisis for a demography that is already economically vulnerable. It is especially significant when we consider that female informal workers account for 95% in South Asia, 89% in sub-Saharan Africa, and 59% in Latin America and the Caribbean.

New crisis and old urban issues in the Global South

Lockdown and social distancing have proved to work in diverse contexts as measures to prevent the spread of the disease. Certain conditions facilitate following these protocols, such as: housing (mostly formal); clear differentiation between private and public space, home and work; access to digital tools and technological literacy; access to water; and formal employment.

These conditions are common in the Global North, and in the elite neighborhoods in the Global South. A large portion of the population of the Global South has to deal with reduced, shared, and unaffordable housing (informal and/or auto-constructed); shared basic infrastructure (toilets, kitchens, water taps); high rates of informal employment (i.e. informal workers represent 10% of total employment in France; in Mexico, they represent 53%); citizens earning their livings in public space; and livelihoods that depend on mobility and contact with others.

In these conditions, lockdowns and social distancing have been hard to enforce — or, if so, it was limited to elite neighborhoods. Technology has been hailed as a way to keep going forward while on lockdown. But access to technology is still a luxury for many people.

For example, the Mexican government announced in early August that classes would continue by TV. As we know, a home office is not possible for everyone, as parents still have to go to work, while many others have lost their jobs, forcing them during this crisis into informal employment (meaning contact with people and public space). Furthermore, certain countries in Latin America have dealt with security crises in the past decades, and issues of violence have unfortunately not been reduced during the pandemic.

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Life in the public space didn’t stop. It continued — with masks and gloves, and amidst violence from common and organized crime, as well as law enforcement. For the populations that don’t exactly fit into our three-act structure, COVID-19 didn’t reveal new vulnerabilities. It intensified those that were already there.

Therefore, it is our responsibility, as actors for urban change, to consider other narratives and urban lives into our formulations of the present and the future of this pandemic.

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Edna Peza is an architect-urbanist and PhD candidate at the Université de Paris (CESSMA Laboratory), specializing on the link between feelings of insecurity, daily routines, and public spaces. Her research is funded by the Horizon 2020 Marie Curie Actions and the Fondation Palladio. She is the founder of CITY-CITÉ-CIUDAD, an international startup focusing on collaborating with urban actors to improve safety in public spaces at a human scale.