When We Collectively Set Foot on Streets Again

by Juan SEBASTIÁN MORENO

I. This piece was originally about how cities in Latin America were dealing with the climate crisis – a challenge not of their own making, but rather one forced upon them. It was about the precariousness of urban life, about the everyday manifestations of colonial power that still want to civilize the Other. Finally, it was about the fluid meaning of the concept of emergence in the Spanish language, an apt metaphor to describe how these cities can address the uncertainty ahead of them. Little did I know about uncertainty. After withstanding three decades of neoliberal assault by the Washington Consensus, healthcare systems in cities of the global South – so different in shape, size, smell, yet so united by a common plight – are slowly but effectively being ravaged by the effects of a pandemic. Were the situation less dire, I would find some delight in the irony of a virus bringing the world to a halt, of all frameworks to discuss emergencies being shattered. A temporary consolation, however, is that at least the amorphous effects of global phenomena – so hard to pin down when talking about local droughts, or floods, or famines – are now drawn before us with absolute clarity. An enemy has been named, and we are constantly being invited to watch carefully how this war is being waged. I digress. Thinking about military discourse to fight an illness is another problem in itself. For now, with enough attention, there is perhaps something to be learned from the chronic and painful asymmetries that a virus has laid bare.

II. I will not to let a good analogy go to waste, and I intend to salvage at least one component of my initial thoughts. In Spanish, the word emergencia carries a triple meaning: first, it means emergence, the creation or germination of new things or ideas; it can also represent a calamity, an unexpected accident that produces an uncertain state of affairs; finally, it conveys a sense of emergency, of

impending peril and danger. (Common sense would consider that the perpetual ambiguity of the Spanish language impedes it to describe with precision. Yet I find comfort in using words so filled with meaning, always demanding for context in order to make sense.) What is this pandemic (which needs a more prosaic name than “covid-19,” or at least some capitalization as The Pandemic) if not calamity born out of thin air; what does it convey, if not a reiterating sense of unrealized disaster. Death tolls increasing, everyday life tightening, curves not flattening – but we still don’t know when the worst will be over. While the outcomes of the crisis are far from being determined, I believe there is some radical change in the way we think about cities. These gargantuan, cruel, and marvelous crucibles of human interaction will be transformed. And we, as a privileged group that has the existential privilege of thinking about cities while inhabiting in them, can turn this emergencia from emergency to emergence.

III. The road will not be easy. Specially for informal settlements – a common occurrence in the South and the North, albeit with different features – The Pandemic envelops multiple challenges. The threat of the virus has risen in opposition to the fear of poverty and precarity. The paradoxical outcome of this situation was best summarized, decades ago, by the Cuban poet Nicolás Guillen: “me matan si no trabajo, y si trabajo me matan.” They kill me if I don’t work, and if I work they kill me. The radical contradiction of capitalism, one that illustrates the struggle for survival of workers, has now another form: you need to stay inside to survive, but you will die if you stay inside. That is the reality that many informal workers, who earn their daily livelihood in the dynamic yet uncertain flow of cities, are now facing. The contradiction takes hold in the racialization of politics in the United States, in the profound mistrust of state agencies in Brazil, in the search for absolute power by an ethnically-oriented government in India, or in the reversal of migratory fluxes between Venezuela and Colombia. In all these cases, quarantines – the most rational measure to slow the spread of the virus – have result in hunger and dispossession for the working poor, who suddenly find themselves among empty streets, with no means to make a living. We are told to stay home. What kind of homes are those, in vast swathes of urban fabrics in the global South? Never mind the overcrowding, the precarious materials, or the absence of running water. These are homes that need the street to survive – to barter for food, to get help from neighbors, to have hope in surviving. So perhaps the most salient loss that informal settlements will have to endure is the tearing of social networks as a result of the fight against the virus. These are critical mechanisms that enable the everyday life of their residents. But with many poor migrants gone and support systems forever altered by death and displacement, there is a more present threat to survival than The Pandemic itself. Maybe this is another lesson in the complexity that is deeply embedded in informal settlements. Sanitary measures that seem to work elsewhere will have deleterious effects on the lives of these communities, who every day wage a battle against precariousness and exclusion. The close and often paradoxical relationship between urban planning and hygienist thought has brought us to a point of inflection. The permanent nature of informality as an urban phenomenon has perpetuated hygienic discourses – ranging from legitimate concerns on light and air to enacting mass displacement – in planning debates and practices. They also permeate current approaches to health and sanitation in the global South. On one hand, informal settlements are still considered ideal places for the spread of disease. But informal settlements are not a vector of infection. They face, instead, a disproportionate risk of being ravaged by a virus as a consequence of the exclusionary emplacement of public infrastructure, limited access to health services, and a profound disconnection from the formal city. On the other hand, the presence of informal residents in other parts of the city – as street vendors, for example – has been read as a threat to the modernizing project of the urban experience. When we collectively set foot on streets again, an opportunity to reclaim cities will begin. It will not live for long, and the opponents – the usual ones, again – will still be mighty. But I would find it untenable to keep reflecting on the urban experience as if this calamity had not radically altered us. This represents the critical moment to tear down the artificial division between the formal and the informal, and to fight against the tangible separation of the urban poor. It will be a time to revert the necropolitics that have dominated the construction of the built environment, and to make cities places for the living. 29