Problematising density: COVID-19, the crowd, and urban life

Post‐pandemic cities: An urban lexicon of accelerations/decelerations

“…While lockdowns entailed a vast process of temporary de‐densification of urban space, especially of city centres, in some especially poorer urban areas physical isolation at home or in the neighbourhood was next to impossible (Durizzo et al, 2021; Sengupta & Jha, 2020). Across the pandemic, national and city governments adopted radically different approaches to managing densities, rolling out a host of changing restrictions and spatial arrangements to minimise contact between people in transit systems, at work, in the neighbourhood, and in public spaces (Joiner et al, 2022).…”

“…While those problematisations are largely a product of the pandemic, they are also shaped through histories of social power, inequality and perception of different urban groups and forms of crowding (Clarke & Barnett, 2023; Joiner et al, 2022). For city governments, the key challenge was to ‘manage out’ crowds, to create the architectures and regulations that would prevent crowds and crowding of different sorts from forming, and with varying levels of success.…”

Density and pandemic urbanism: Exposure and networked density in Manila and Taipei

“…The pandemic governance of urban density reshaped everyday routines, challenged public health knowledge, enhanced the nature and scope of techno-social interventions, led to the remodelling of building interiors, and impacted public perceptions and experiences (Hamidi et al, 2020; McFarlane, 2021). Not surprisingly, urban density gathered significant popular and scholarly attention over the course of the pandemic (Acuto, 2020; Boterman, 2020; Connolly et al, 2020; Joiner et al, 2022). This work is part of a larger literature on COVID-19’s impact on cities, covering four key areas (see Aalbers et al, 2020; Marvin et al, 2023; Sparke and Anguelov, 2020).…”

“…The second is governance. Research on public policies has examined how temporary political controls have become longer-term state control (Kipfer and Mohamud, 2021), and how the pandemic catalysed shifts to greater digital experimentation, crowd control, and security regulation (Acuto, 2020; Chen et al, 2020; Jin and Zhao, 2022; Joiner et al, 2022; McGuirk et al, 2021). The third is vulnerabilities , and in particular how elderly, disabled, impoverished, or otherwise marginalised groups saw their struggles intensify in the pandemic and its aftermath, including lines along race, ethnicity, and class (Brickell, 2023; Pitter, 2020).…”

Density and the compact city

“…And fourth, in work with postgraduates at Durham (Joiner et al, 2022), we examined how people in British cities perceive urban crowds in the wake of the pandemic. We explored how fear and anxiety of crowds surface amongst residents, as well as how some people long for the buzz and bustle of the city crowd (McFarlane, 2021).…”