COVID and the Urban: cross-disciplinary perspectives on emergency

As the COVID emergency has unfolded over the last year, we have seen urban life subject to critical governance and management interventions which have varied significantly across the international context, both in their form and in the way they have been received or contested by the public.

These events have highlighted deep social and cultural differences and inequalities between ‘pandemic cities’ in the way they are managing the present and planning the future, particularly in regard to the viability of cities within the planetary ecology.

This event hosted by UCL Urban Laboratory and Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction provides a platform for seven speakers from different disciplinary backgrounds to draw together technical, social and design perspectives on the four stages of the COVID emergency in relation to their work in different and comparative global contexts: improvisation, planning, dissent, and reconstruction.

11.00 - 12.30 Scrutinising infrastructures of risk and recovery across uneven urban landscapes

This interactive discussion features three different technical and infrastructural approaches to exploring 'Covid and the Urban'. They will ask, 'to what degree is what we are seeing now different to how we think of issues of risk and vulnerability in the past? How do we understand ‘urban expertise’ in light of Covid? If placed under scrutiny, which types of systems might have longer term consequences to living with Covid? When looking at the nexus of climate health and equity health, will our responses have benefits for the long term, in the capacity of recovery and reconstruction? ' With examples from Latin America, Asia and the UK.

Through presentation and discussion we will gain a sectoral overview on the nexus of climate health and equity health with insights from a mayoral task force and their responses in the short, medium and long term to Covid, learn of the interweaving of infrastructural systems and the claim that they have been repurposed to change or modulate the transmission of Covid, and better understand what Covid means for an intellectual response to contemporary urban issues. With examples from Latin America, Asia and the UK.

Chaired by Clare Melhuish, Director of UCL Urban Laboratory

Speakers:

Mehrnaz Ghojeh, Head of City Finance Facility at C40 Cities

Simon Marvin, Director of the Urban Institute, the University of Sheffield

Austin Zeiderman, Associate Professor of Geography, LSE

13.00 - 13.45 Live Film Screening of Laki Haze (2020) followed by William Raban in conversation with Carina Fearnley

Following the eruption of the Lakakigar volcano, Iceland in 1783, a sulphurous haze shrouded vast swathes of the northern hemisphere, causing widespread crop failures, consequent famine and disease across Europe, parts of America, North Africa, and India. It is estimated to have killed millions of people. Using first-hand accounts from Iceland and from across Europe. The film continues Raban’s recent research into the use of the single long take and revisits his preoccupations with landscape film from the early 1970s.

In conversation:

Introduced by Matthew Beaumont, Professor of English, UCL and Co-Director, UCL Urban Laboratory

Carina Fearnley, Associate Professor in Science and Technology Studies, Director, UCL Warning Research Centre

William Raban, artist filmmaker, Professor Emeritus in Film, London College of Communication

14.00 - 15.30 Improvise, innovate, adapt: perspectives on emergency from beyond the city

In our closing session we bring together a diverse mix of academics from comparative literature, jazz improvisation and early warning systems, to apply transdisciplinary approaches to crisis management. What relations of call and response - of voicing, listening and attending - do urban emergencies put into play? Does emergency have a colour? Is it whitewashed? What if emergency is not an interruption but a state of being, a permanent productive one? How do we refocus emergencies as a human issue rather than a technocratic or an environmental one?

Chaired by Ilan Kelman, Professor, UCL Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction and UCL Institute for Global Health

Speakers:

Carina Fearnley, Associate Professor in Science and Technology Studies, Director, UCL Warning Research Centre

Ajay Heble, Professor, School of English and Theatre Studies, University of Guelph, Director, International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation

Kasia Mika, Lecturer in Comparative Literature, Queen Mary University of London

15.30 Closing remarks