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

Abstract

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically transformed the fundamentals of city management and everyday life. Density has been at the centre of this transformation. But how were densities managed during the pandemic? What are the political implications? And how did people come to perceive and experience densities? Drawing on research in five British cities – Birmingham, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Manchester, and Newcastle – we argue that the pandemic produced a set of new problematisations of density. Those problematisations brought multiple concerns into connection with density: control and rights, the politics of crowds and protest, differential susceptibility to infection, changing orientations to the urban future, and patterns of social anxiety, trust and blame. We seek to advance research in Geography and Urban Studies on how urban densities are governed and experienced, on the urban dimensions of COVID-19, and on how an attention to density generates insight into the social and political life of cities.