Under lockdown: Remaking “home” through infrastructures of care during COVID-19

Abstract

This paper examines how poor urban residents in the Sun Valley public housing community in Denver, CO (US) experienced the pandemic during the first few months of the crisis. Employing a framework that focuses on people, community, housing and home as potential spaces and possibilities of “infrastructures of care”, this research examines the strategies and practices that emerged during the pandemic to address the immediate needs and concerns of the Sun Valley residents. We consider how these practices and the pandemic itself have potentially led to new imaginings and understandings of home and community, both at the intimate and collective scales. Using qualitative methods and photo-voice techniques, we documented residents’ experience during lockdown. Their narratives reveal the many ways the COVID-19 pandemic has affected people’s lives and highlight how community support, services and home are necessary for ensuring that residents can develop resilient infrastructures of care that allow them to overcome public health crises.