Faced with the asymmetrical distribution of COVID-19’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 the 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 research project, funded by the Urban Studies Foundation’s Pandemics and Cities fund, examines how CBOs in Cape Town (South Africa) and Cali (Colombia) leveraged social infrastructure to support their communities during the pandemic. This project builds upon existing partnerships and collaborative research between interdisciplinary teams from Urban Studies, Political Science, and Communication Studies. It aims to foster a deeper understanding of community resilience, exploring how CBOs’ pandemic response could guide future crisis strategies for marginalised urban communities.
Through a mix of reflective interviews, focus groups, and digital diaries, the research documents how CBOs created new or adapted social resources in three primary areas—food provision, care support, and digital inclusion—during the pandemic and lockdown periods. The methodology also examines the implications of CBO-led efforts on social, spatial, and material dynamics within these neighbourhoods. Findings reveal that CBOs’ hyper-local embeddedness enabled them to offer sustained support and innovation but also highlighted limitations in scaling up resources.
The project has highlighted the crucial role of CBOs in urban crisis response and contributed to new understandings of community resilience. It has fostered international collaboration and knowledge exchange, while providing insights for future pandemic preparedness at the neighbourhood scale. The project’s results, presented in public workshops and journal articles, underscore the transformative potential of localised, community-driven support systems in the face of global crises.
