Event

In March 2020, cities around the world pivoted towards managing the Covid-19 pandemic, a global public health crisis playing out across longstanding patterns of uneven urban development. Almost immediately, the home and the neighbourhood were mobilized as key sites in public health strategies for managing the multiple exigencies provoked by the pandemic, although with notable differences across national, regional, and local scales. From “Stay in Your Neighbourhood” (quédate en tu barrio) in Buenos Aires to Ottawa’s “Neighbourhood Strategy” (estratégia barrial), public health strategies across the Americas engaged a range of neighbourhood-based tools and tactics for responding to the Covid-19 pandemic. In this research, we excavate the layered spatialities of pandemic management at the neighbourhood level in Ottawa. In the context of emergency, overwork, and the multifaceted crises of caregiving and health, neighbourhood strategies not only reinforced established forms of power and uneven development, but also revealed potential pathways for more liberatory and transformational urban futures.

Early in the pandemic in Ottawa, it became clear that older residents, racialized communities, immigrants, women, and lower income groups were most impacted by the Covid-19 crisis. This was related to higher case rates and poorer health outcomes shaped by the social determinants of health as well as the impact that public health orders and practices (designed to reduce the spread of the virus) were having on people with minimal economic resources, precarious employment, and limited childcare options and/or access to living, community, and public space. At the local level, existing socio-economic inequities quickly exposed the limitations of monolithic public health strategies for addressing socially differentiated publics.

In Ottawa, the neighbourhood became the lens through which the layered and entangled spatialities of “emergency welfarism” (Webb, 2022) and “slow emergencies” (Anderson et al, 2020) emerged into the spotlight. In response, local public health officials cobbled together what we refer to as the “neighbourhood strategy”, a collection of improvised, even experimental, efforts to limit the spread of Covid-19 and mitigate the impact of the pandemic on immigrant, racialized, and lower income residents. Targeting priority neighbourhoods for outreach, testing, vaccination, and public health information provided a mechanism to reach some of the most affected residents with much needed supports. However, these strategies used pre-existing spatial and data collection tools, some of which had roots in state led efforts to police and regulate poor communities. Neighbourhoods were identified and targeted as bounded entities, raising concerns about stigma, surveillance, and the limitations of focusing on residential spaces. The hyper-focus on the residential unit as a site of measuring case rates significantly overlooked precarious conditions of overwork, exposure, and depletion in front line labour, a situation which continues to this day.

As a case study, pandemic management in Ottawa uncovers the structural ties between the layered spatialities of crisis and how a health crisis is also composed of everyday crises of housing, labour conditions (waged and unwaged), food security, elder and childcare, carceral institutions, education, etc. Attentiveness to these layered spatialities not only exposes deeply embedded forms of inequality, but also highlights possibilities for more just geographies and imaginaries of recovery rooted in various forms of collective and community care.

Our research draws from over 2 years of fieldwork and 44 in-depth group and individual interviews conducted with a variety of actors involved in both the planning and implementation of Ottawa’s neighbourhood strategy, including staff at community health and resource centres, settlement and housing organizations, Ottawa Public Health, faith and community leaders and local politicians. Our field research also incorporates participant observation from various committee and board meetings at the city, public briefings, and community meetings, as well as a review of media coverage and existing research.

References
Anderson, B., Grove, K., Rickards, L. and Kearns, M. 2020. Slow Emergencies: Temporality and the Racialized Biopolitics of Emergency Governance. Progress in Human Geography 44(4): 621- 639.
Webb, Chris. 2022. Pandemic Lessons for Rebuilding Canada’s Welfare State. Socialist Project: The Bullet (November 14).

Mexico City, long considered an exemplary case of urban crisis, dysfunction, and unsustainability, has improved its environmental image in the twenty-first century. In recent years, the city has garnered global acclaim for its ambitious sustainable mobility policies and roadway reconfigurations, including the creation of a bicycle network. However, infrastructural provisions for cycling have been concentrated in the wealthier core of the city, limiting the potential for modal shift to cycling and raising equity concerns. Seeking to expand the cycling network and address the neglect of poorer and peripheral neighbourhoods, the current municipal government has aimed to develop regional connections as well as bicycle networks on the periphery. However, this bicycle strategy was quickly forced to adapt to the Covid-19 pandemic, a series of disasters affecting public transport operation, and political pressure following the 2022 district elections.


Tracing the scalar, temporal, and sociomaterial limitations on infrastructural reconfiguration for cycling within the ‘crisis-ordinary’ (Berlant 2011) of urban mobility in Mexico City, this paper examines: (1) the deployment and differential trajectory of emergency cycling lanes created during the Covid-19 pandemic; and (2) the intermodal cycling network strategy on the southeastern periphery, in the context of the L12 metro disaster of 2021. Highlighting the role of both state and civil society institutions in responding to crises and windows of opportunity, these cases raise wider questions about how crises are differentially problematized and reveal broader tensions between long-term planning and short-term responses to crises and political demands in the consolidation of the bicycle network.

Health authorities around the world are sampling sewage to make near real-time assessments of a city's health. Wastewater surveillance has historically been deployed by public institutions to manage infectious disease, monitor environmental pollutants, and detect illicit pharmaceuticals. With recent public health crises, however, the technique has gained international prominence, fuelled in part by biotechnology firms that are marketing the surveillance system as a solution for governing contemporary outbreaks of COVID-19, polio, and monkeypox. Biotechnology firms such as Kando, Ginkgo Bioworks, and Biobot are developing and selling “smart sewers” and working to install “wastewater intelligence platforms” in cities across the world. At the same time, new sites of wastewater labour collection and monitoring are undergoing consolidation and contestation, as incarcerated people in prisons, utilities workers at wastewater treatment plants, and college students at campus dormitories are being hailed into this project as workers due, in part, to crises in public health investment.

International and national wastewater data privacy guidelines are currently being developed, unevenly, to address ethical concerns related to wastewater collection. Much of the debate shaping these guidelines has focused on concerns of data privacy: how to ensure individuals are not easily identifiable through the non-consensual tracking of their excreted microbial and genetic data. However, as surveillance studies scholars such as David Lyon and Simone Browne implore, while questions of individual privacy are important, the normalization of surveillance raises a whole host of potential concerns around discrimination, overpolicing, undercounting, data sovereignty, and profit-making. For instance, when wastewater surveillance is targeted to monitor opioid usage, driven by biotech firms (as it has been in Cary, North Carolina), who has a say in how this data is used, and how is this data collection wound up in carceral accumulation logics? When the state conducts near source testing of migrant labour dormitories, refugee camps, and prisons, how might these populations’ movements be further curtailed and how might already precarious individuals be further cut off from their communities of care, even as they’re being asked to collect samples? Who stands to make money from these endeavours, how is public health being transformed, and who is cast aside? On the other hand, with the development of mundane and low-cost wastewater surveillance technologies, it is now possible for communities, homeless shelters, and poorly endowed public health units to monitor the health of their own communities. What are some of the ways wastewater surveillance has been used towards progressive, even radical, ends, to protect communities’ holistic wellbeing, and what are the steps necessary to ensure a just usage of this monitoring technology?

In this paper we begin to tease out how public health officials, epidemiologists, utilities workers, surveillance critics, and community justice organizers are contesting the social and spatial justice implications of the normalization of wastewater surveillance and its profit. Drawing on literature in biosecurity, surveillance studies, and the political ecology of data, semi-structured interviews with wastewater surveillance stakeholders across India, Bangladesh, Canada, Israel, and the United States, and a workshop we’ve organized around wastewater surveillance and justice, in this talk we examine how and to what effects wastewater surveillance is a contested frontier of capitalist valuation and community care.

Keywords: surveillance; urban crisis; public health; justice

What is at stake for the next 100 years? (…) It is happiness as a concept that is connected to the way we work and the way we live our daily lives, combining everything we are entitled to as citizens and as individuals and unique personalities. And Greece can claim this ‘happiness’ of the future. (Kyriakos Mitsotakis, prime minister of Greece)
The concept of happiness has been widely used by cities and states in place branding strategies for the attraction of tourists (Urry and Larsen, 2011), work tourists (Woldoff and Litchfield, 2021), and lifestyle migrants (Benson and O’Reilly, 2009). But less focus has been put on the effects of such place branding strategies on local populations and the ways in which political elites construct, narrate, and justify happiness in governmental discourses as both a desirable and imperative rationality for disciplining their citizens.
The case of Greece is analytically fruitful in this regard, as happiness has been a frequent subject of recent governmental proclamations in the attempt to brand the country anew after the sovereign debt crisis, when the proliferation of moralizing discourses of guilt, blame, and debt impacted its nation brand. “The combined feeling of freedom, happiness and contact with nature” (Marketing Greece, 2020) that Athens and the Greek islands supposedly provide is again at the forefront of branding campaigns, focusing on stereotypes of natural beauty, antique culture, laid-back way of life, and crisis-chic aesthetics, which are fused into consumable experiences.

Using critical discourse analysis, we investigate how happiness is discursively constructed and promoted to the local population by government actors at different scales. We argue that for the Greek government, happiness forms a governmental vision for the country’s future and a growth strategy after more than a decade of crisis. Specifically, happiness has been promoted as an experience that the country can generate not only to tourists and desirable migrants, but also for its citizens and brain drainers, which sheds novel light on the finding that branding strategies are a means for constructing and reinforcing local identity and identification with a place (Harvey, 1989; Kavaratzis, 2004).

For the governmental vision of happiness to seem attainable and justified, its key promoters build on positive psychology (e.g. Seligman and Rashid, 2018), in order to sanitise and nurture positive emotions about the past (satisfaction, pride, fulfilment), the present (joy, pleasure, mindfulness) and the future (faith, optimism, trust, confidence) towards building efficiency, productivity, creativity, and resilience.

In so doing, the happiness vision seeks to encourage the local population to be happy, while at the same time disciplining it. Responsibility is placed on the individual, rather than on structural constraints, as people can choose to be happy (and consequently successful) or choose to be miserable (and suffer the consequences). Happiness arises not by challenging and overcoming the precarising qualities of state-market-citizen relations, but by having a positive attitude in navigating them. Any structural critique is dismissed as miserabilism and if critique occurs, it can only arise as self-critique.

To render this vision meaningful, happiness is addressed to local inhabitants and brain drainers with the same stereotypes of the enjoyment of the Greek way of life and the happiness that this entails, as when targeting tourists. The happiness vision thus inverts the tourist gaze of ‘living like a local’ by appealing to the local population and brain drainers through what we call ‘live like a tourist’. This is promoted despite the absence of an improvements in the material reality in the country, through the construction and justification of a trade-off between sociality and decent living conditions.

Keywords: Happiness, critical discourse analysis, live like a tourist, place branding

References
Benson M and O'Reilly K (Eds.) (2009) Lifestyle Migration: Expectations, Aspirations and Experiences. Routledge.
Harvey D (1989) From managerialism to entrepreneurialism: the transformation in urban governance in late capitalism. Geografiska Annaler: series B, human geography 71(1): 3-17.
Kavaratzis M (2004) From city marketing to city branding: Towards a theoretical framework for developing city brands. Place branding 1(1): 58-73.
Marketing Greece (2020). Official website: https://www.marketinggreece.com/en
Seligman MEP and Rashid T (2018) Positive Psychotherapy: Clinician Manual. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Urry J and Larsen J (2011) The tourist gaze 3.0. Sage.
Woldoff RA and Litchfield RC (2021) Digital nomads: In search of freedom, community, and meaningful work in the new economy. Oxford University Press.

In 2023 cities rarely have time to recover between crises let alone prepare for the next. As it takes multiple, overlapping, intersecting, and cascading forms, urban crisis changes the way that already strained health systems work or don’t work for marginalized urban inhabitants. Crisis signals unique danger for residents who are most vulnerable to suffering the effects of any form of crisis (economic, social, health, environmental, etc). Building on ideas of crisis policy making (Temenos 2022) in an era of policy mobilities, we examine home grown solutions for attending to the health needs of people at the margins amidst crisis conditions in Santiago Chile and Manchester United Kingdom. These are preliminary findings about existing models of crisis improvisation from a relational comparative project that also includes Athens Greece. Based on interviews with professionals working in health and social care services, government, and policy, we trace some of the activities that take place in the midst of crisis: operating in service cracks and holes, making strategies to weather crisis conditions, and leaving lasting changes to the system in the ways they can. Nodding to Hall and Gramsci’s ideas about crisis as the site of systemic rebirth, these findings suggest that the ways people make life in crisis’ liminal space play a granular role in systemic transition.