How are civil society organizations responding to COVID-19’s impacts on informal settlements? In Latin America, civil society organizations have developed a repertoire of collective action, seeking to provide immediate and medium-term responses to the emergency. This paper aims to map these initiatives and identify strategic approaches to tackle the issues, given the strengths of those undertaking the initiative, and the scope, purpose and sphere of intervention. Using direct contact, a survey, and a virtual ethnography with social organizations has allowed us to identify and characterize the initiatives. The repertoire focuses on emergency measures around food security, and pedagogies for prevention, sanitation and income relief at the neighbourhood and district levels. We argue that the civil society response repertoire is diverse in form and resources but limited in scope; meanwhile the urgency of the situation and the mismatch with state action mean that crucial spheres of informality, vital to cultivating grounds for a healthy recovery phase, are being neglected.

The circulation of ideas about 'best practices' and policies shape multi-scalar governance networks. This paper examines the role of the international press, both as an actor and as a medium for the circulation of urban planning models. We aim to deepen the theoretical notions on the role of media, particularly the written press, in building narratives of 'urban models', and their circulation in other contexts. And second, by extending the reaches of multi-sited ethnography as the main methodological approach to follow policy mobility. This research monitored, and analysed news items published about Medellín on the digital editions of several newspapers across the globe between 2004 and 2017. The resulting examination shows, firstly, how the changes of the image of the city has been portrayed over time, with a growth of news items highlighting Medellín's urban model as an inspirational source for other cities in the world. Secondly, the research shows the importance of international media for building a particular storytelling about urban transformations. We argue that newspapers constitute a key informational infrastructure for urban policy mobility contributing to amplify mythical narratives of 'urban models' and to institute new metrics of good governance.

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.

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This article argues that the role of storytelling in planning needs to be rethought learning from the decolonial turn in social sciences. I ask how to decolonise storytelling in planning theory and practice. The aim is to explore how key notions from Latin American decolonial thinking, such as pluriverse, epistemological disobedience, border thinking and sentipensar, can help us to reframe storytelling in planning. This reframing can contribute to finding different avenues to build ontological relationality in a framework of epistemological justice and healing to bring about new imaginations for shaping urban planning otherwise.