Pandemic Resilience and Cities:
Learning from CBOs
From social infrastructure to pandemic resilience?: Learning from and with low-income urban communities
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Faced with the asymmetrical distribution of Covid’s effects in cities, low-income communities have a critical role in building local resilience. Globally, both pandemic and control measures have severely affected residents’ ability to meet basic needs, particularly relating to food, services (e.g. health, education, childcare), and access to reliable information.
State-led pandemic responses have often fallen short of the appropriate and effective interventions needed at the local scale. Community-based organisations (CBOs) have played a decisive role in pandemic response in many low income neighbourhoods, mitigating vulnerabilities by responding to gaps in basic needs provisioning. The pandemic’s critical juncture offers transformative potential for CBOs, revealing them as key actors at neighbourhood and urban scale.
This symposium is dedicated to the study of the ways in which the infrastructure employed by CBOs promotes social practices of pandemic resilience. To this end, community leaders from Cape Town (South Africa) and Cali (Colombia) will share their experiences and contributions to the optimisation of their social resources for coping with global crises.
