Sarita Pillay Gonzalez & Miriam Maina (Postgraduate Students

Research “On the Fly” : The City Lockdown Diaries Project in Gauteng

SARITA PILLAY GONZALEZ AND MIRIAM MAINA Postgraduate Student

A Research Moment in a Moment of Uncertainty The days and hours preceding the national lockdown in South Africa were characterised by uncertainty. Many breadwinners ended the working day on 26 March not knowing what the impending three-week lockdown would mean for their jobs and income. We, like many other students and young academics, were uncertain as to how the lockdown would affect our be experiencing the lockdown where they lived. What was about to unfold was historically unprecedented, and occurring globally, presenting a unique research moment.

As urban planning scholars with some backgroundknowledge about the built environment and civil society – we saw an opportunity to document and analyse the socio-spatial differentiation of a lockdown in urban, postapartheid South Africa. How would people living in different

What are our responsibilities, strategies, and capacities in moments of uncertainty, crises, or upheaval? ” fieldwork, funding, and work spaces and places of Gauteng submissions. experience the lockdown? Two As South Africa neared drafted a concept note for City midnight of the 27th March, Lockdown Diaries – a project images of army trucks rolling that would monitor and analyse into some areas, and rows of the experience of the lockdown empty supermarket shelves of people living in different parts in others, circulated on social of Gauteng. Our intention was media platforms – presenting to share these experiences and early signs that people in narratives through social media different spaces and socio- and undertake deeper analysis economic circumstances would for academic purposes. days prior to the lockdown, we very differently. Mobility was Academic projects usually to be limited to travel for require months of planning essentials, and people were and preparation, but here to “stay home” in the spaces we were presented with a

moment that required research “on the fly”. The COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown raised important questions: what are our responsibilities, strategies, and capacities in moments of uncertainty, crises, or upheaval? Does the academy today enable or encourage us to respond to such moments through ethical, adaptive, and immediate research?

Unusual Times call for Unusual Methods

The initiation of the project was unconventional. It required responding rapidly to a moment: mobilising existing resources, networks and connections; and the adoption of nimble and versatile methods of data collection. The premise of the concept was to monitor the lockdown experience of people living in different parts of Gauteng. Our primary criterion was spatial heterogeneity, as we sought to ensure broad representation from suburbia, gated communities, innercities, and townships, from different parts of the Province.

In the days prior to the lockdown, we reached out to individuals we knew who lived in different parts of Gauteng in varied housing types. This required mobilising personal, professional, and activist networks of the small group of us in the South African Research Chair in Spatial Analysis and City Planning. By the end of the first week we had confirmed 25 participants and were receiving regular diary entries daily.

Participants were asked to send regular diary entries via voice note or text message, narrating their lockdown experience for the initial twenty-one-day period. They also had the option of sending photos or videos. Diary entries could be as broad, or specific, as participants wished, but they were asked to answer two primary questions:

1. What did I do? 2. What did I observe?

Although rapid and remote research, clarity and consent with participants was prioritised. Participants were offered the opportunity to stay anonymous, asked whether they consented to excerpts of their diaries being shared occasionally on social media, and were told that the findings of the research would be used for academic purposes. Participants provided consent to their participation via WhatsApp. The option was also given to provide airtime assistance, where this was required.

The primary medium for communication and data collection for this project was the social messaging app, WhatsApp. Through

Figure 7: Sample of a diary entry sent by Nan (not their real name), a nurse from Diepkloof, Soweto

text messages, voice notes, and images, this allowed for relatively affordable remote communication and datacollection in a time of social distancing. In the immediate lockdown window from 27 March to 17 April, we received regular diary entries from most of the participating respondents. However, as the lockdown period was extended by an additional two weeks, diary entries waned, although many participants chose to continue with the project. By the end of the five-week Level 5 lockdown, we had received 334 entries, of which 127 were voice notes 1 .

In addition to the diary entries, participants were also asked to participate in two online surveys between March 27th and April 30th. These surveys were intended to provide quantitative and qualitative data on their households, living conditions, neighbourhood characteristics, policing and access to goods.

The two surveys were refined and restructured into a larger, longer survey titled: “Experience of the Lockdown in Gauteng”2 which was subsequently circulated to the public through Twitter, Facebook, and WhatsApp. This survey served as an additional data collection tool, to corroborate or challenge our findings from the diaries and participant surveys and

provide a wider sample to track specific spatial metrics. To date, 124 respondents have taken this general survey. Figure 8 indicates responses to a question we used for participating respondents, which was later adapted and refined for a general public survey. The Tweeting Researcher: Balancing real-time engagement with long-term academic outputs From the outset, this project was intended to share and engage with real-time conversations about the lockdown, while also undertaking a deeper analysis for long-term academic outputs. Emerging findings were posted on a Wordpress

Figure 8: Sample data assembled from surveys

blog3, and shared on social media platforms such as Twitter4 and Facebook5 . This short-term data dissemination allowed for online sharing and interaction on lockdown themes. Alongside this, we have been collating and coding data for more conventional academic outputs.

This method would blur the traditional ‘line’ between data collection and publication. It required the immediate processing of data, and selected data-sharing – prior to thorough data analysis and publication, as in the conventional academic research practice. Emerging themes from diary entries were published on a weblog6 and quantitative and spatial data shared through a dynamic data analytics page7. Through tweets with hashtags such as #covid19, #lockdownSA or #lockdownextension, emerging observations and narratives from the project could be linked to a broader conversation that was occurring nationally on social media.

Our initial aspirations were to consistently analyse the data in real time, to disseminate excerpts on a regular basis via social media, as well as

Figure 9: Collage compilation of Twitter posts from the City Lockdown Project8

Figure 10 (above): Interactive project dashboard, showing the location of

respondents with dynamic diary entries9

Figure 11 (left): Thematic presentation of ‘the everyday’ from the City Locked Down weblog10

to write analysis pieces. We had, however, underestimated the administrative tasks required to maintain the social media and web platforms for the project alongside the day-to-day communication with participants, as well as collection, curation, and analysis of diary entries.

This limited our ability to undertake analysis of the incoming entries, and to write even short pieces about what we were finding.

Furthermore, we had to still contend with our regular research and PhD work. The next few months give us the time to engage deeply with the diary entries and surveys for the purposes of academic outputs

Conclusion

The City Lockdown Diaries project was initiated “on the fly” to understand and analyse a moment created by a nationwide lockdown in South Africa to curb the spread of COVID-19. As built environment professionals, we intended to track, document, and understand how the lockdown was experienced in different spatial environments within the province.

The project drew on adaptive and nimble data collection methods. The project also adopted a dynamic system of real-time information sharing, to complement longterm conventional academic publication. In this way, the project blurred the line between data collection and curation, and processing and dissemination.

In the implementation of the project, our roles as academic researchers were extended and the usual timelines for research sped-up, from conceptualizing and designing the research to networking, mobilization, and management of 25 contributors, alongside traditional research tasks of analysis, processing, and disseminating findings.

The daily diaries provided by individuals over the 35-day lockdown period have provided a rich tapestry of narratives, providing evidence of sociospatial differentiation in the experience of the COVID-19 lockdown in Gauteng Province. Analysis of narratives and survey data is beginning to present insights on how mobility, neighbourhoods, policing and household characteristics, shaded experiences of the lockdown.

Endnotes: 1 Thank you to Kagiso Diale, architecture graduate from the School of Architecture and Planning at WITS, for his assitance in transcribing the project. 2 The general survey can be found on https://docs.google.com/forms/ d/e/1FAIpQLSem3pfzaks9Aj94qC a1VerWDLECtZv5QK-AphOIIpW6Z5ewQ/viewform?usp=sf_link. 3 https://citylockdowndiaries. wordpress.com/ 4 www.twitter.com/CityLockedDown 5 www.facebook.com/pg/SAandCP 6 The City Lockdown Diaries weblog page can be accessed at https:// citylockdowndiaries.wordpress. com/ 7 The City Lockdown research analytics gallery can be accessed at https://public.tableau.com/ profile/city.lockdown.research. johannesburg#!/ 8 The project handle is @ citylockeddown, and can be accessed at https://twitter.com/ CityLockedDown 9 https://citylockdowndiaries. wordpress.com/the-everyday/ 10 https://citylockdowndiaries. wordpress.com/the-everyday/