1.5. Analysis & Artwork: Visual Art & the Lockdown Diaries 6

The City Lockdown Diaries is a 3-part series of publications that share the findings from the City Lockdown Diaries project. This research project was formulated by researchers at the South African Research Chair in Spatial Analysis and City Planning (SA&CP) at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.

As the COVID-19 pandemic took hold globally, lockdowns were a tool used by many governments to curb the spread of the disease. In South Africa, a national lockdown was announced as a tool to enforce social distancing and therefore stop the spread of the coronavirus (Covid-19) by disrupting the chain of transmission, while also easing the burden on public healthcare systems. The “hard lockdown” – which was categorized as Level 5 - was initially intended to last 21 days, from midnight of the 26th of March to 17 April 2020. People were instructed to “stay home” and remain indoors at all times, with mobility and travel limited to essential service workers, and for residents accessing essential goods and services or social grants, as well as those seeking urgent or chronic medical attention. The Level-5 lockdown was later extended to 35 days, from 27 March to 30 April 2020.

The City Lockdown Diaries project focuses on this 35-day period. This issue, and subsequent reports, will present a synthesis of our key findings after analysing 334 diary entries provided by participants, supplemented with survey data gathered over the period. Each report focuses on a specific theme, visually weaving together artwork, diary entries, our analysis and infographics relating to the lockdown experience. We hope that this can be shared and appreciated beyond academia, as the experience of the lockdown became universal. The three parts of this series are:

1. Issue 1: The Spaces & Places of Lockdown 2. Issue 2: The Streets, Shops, and Social Distancing 3. Issue 3: The Struggle of Lockdown: Livelihoods, Stress & Fear

The City Lockdown Diaries showed us that there was spatial differentiation in experiences of the lockdown. The diaries also provided a window into how people navigated social distancing, essential services and work. Through this, it became evident that the lockdown period presented struggles for everyone, althoughthenatureandimpactsofthesestrugglesvaried.Thelong-termeffects of the pandemic and lockdown remain to be seen, and are undoubtedly going to be the subject of research in the future. This work is a small contribution to growing scholarship on the impact of COVID-19 and associated responses to the pandemic. It was only made possible by the dedicated diary entries of participants which allowed us into their homes and minds, even when it was not easy. To all of them, many of whom chose to be anonymous, we say thank you. As urban planning scholars, and as people who ourselves were locked down, we hope this series contributes to a moment where we are rethinking and reshaping our homes, neighbourhoods and world beyond this pandemic and the structural inequities it illustrated.

Sarita Pillay Gonzalez, Dr. Miriam M. Maina & Kagiso Diale