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Analysis of Urban Change, Theory, Action

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The urban process under covid capitalism

David Madden

To cite this article: David Madden (2020) The urban process under covid capitalism, City, 24:5-6,
677-680, DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2020.1846346

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Published online: 09 Dec 2020.

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 Editorial

The urban process under covid

capitalism
David Madden

T
he covid-19 pandemic is a public health crisis, but it also fits into a
broader pattern of capitalist crises and bears their tell-tale sign: a wid-
ening, painful divergence between that which is socially necessary and
that which is economically viable. From housing and health care to social infra-
structure and basic working conditions, the political-economic status quo has
been revealed as incapable of meeting the needs of everyday life. Urbanisation is
not coming to some kind of lugubrious end, as many commentators were argu-
ing earlier in the year (see Madden 2020). Yet covid-19 has made it impossible to
deny the fundamental brittleness of neoliberal urbanism. And it appears to have
already inaugurated a new phase of urban political-economic recomposition,
realignment, and restructuring.
Recent urban history has been punctuated and periodised by crisis. Follow-
ing the global financial meltdown of 2007–2008, cities in Britain, America, and
elsewhere turned, in various and variegated ways, towards a distinctive expres-
sion of neoliberal urbanisation (Beswick et al. 2016; Fujita 2011; Tonkiss 2013).
Cities became sites of increasingly punitive austerity that was at once gener-
alised as well as targeted at specific classes, social groups, racialised popula-
tions, housing tenures, and migration statuses. Aided by state policies and new
technologies, speculative global investment was channelled into any available
cranny in the hyper-commodified and financialised urban landscape—includ-
ing housing at multiple scales and morphologies, from single-family suburban
homes, tiny houses and trailer parks to central-city high-rise flats, co-living
ventures, and district-sized megaprojects. Platformisation and other emerging
forms of digital connectivity began to significantly reshape corporate strategies
as well as techniques of urban governance (see Barns 2019). And the institu-
tional drive towards transborder mobility began to confront a resurgent territo-
rial nationalism that violently repudiated many elements of globalisation even
as it took for granted other aspects of it. There has always been a repressive

URL https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2020.1846346
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
677
City 24–5–6

element of neoliberalism, but post-2008 its authoritarian dimension became

increasingly prominent.
If those were some of the outlines of one dominant model of urbanisation
that followed the last decade’s global financial crisis, what seems to be perco-
lating in today’s emergency? It is far too early to determine the outcome of the
multiple crises of 2020. But it is possible to observe some distinctive conflicts
and pressure points emerging in urban life under what Tithi Bhattacharya and
Gareth Dale call ‘covid capitalism’ (Bhattacharya and Dale 2020). None of these
developments are unprecedented. But they are flashpoints that suggest some of
the contours of the emerging paradigm of urbanisation after covid.
One of the major sources of conflict of covid-capitalist urbanisation is the
prioritisation of rentiers over workers. When the pandemic struck, the state at mul-
tiple levels acted swiftly to protect the interests of property owners. Policies
regarding housing finance and property tax were swiftly altered to try to main-
tain real estate values. But rent relief was left up to the discretion of landlords.
Many cities and countries instituted temporary eviction moratoriums and other
protections for tenants, but these programmes have been time-limited and
insufficient. Meanwhile, work was transformed by lockdown and social-dis-
tancing measures in highly uneven ways. Unemployment has hit its highest
levels in decades. Some professional and managerial work could continue in
sheltered, Zoomified form. But essential workers—many in poorly remunerated
but socially vital roles—were required to continue showing up. Other types of
work have been put on hold entirely. The overall situation is both unjust and
untenable: work has become inconsistent and uncertain yet the rent continues
to steadily accrue. This is the direct result of unfair bailout policies, but it is
symptomatic of an underlying power dynamic. Under covid capitalism, pre-ex-
isting tendencies towards rentierism are accelerating.
Another distinguishing feature of today’s urbanisation is the rise of crisis
opportunism. Investment firms are looking to gorge on distressed assets and real
estate debt. Delivery companies, fulfilment centres and retailers see economic
turmoil as a chance to hire desperate workers on insecure contracts. And some
companies are seeking to profit directly off social misery, such as the start-up
pursuing a business model that has been described as ‘Uber, but for evicting
people’ (Rodrigues 2020). In a period marked by the overproduction of social
suffering, some firms see this suffering as a bounteous resource to be exploited.
Disaster capitalism is being normalised, rescaled, and extended into new cor-
ners of urban life.
It is also clear that covid is becoming a new ideological keyword. Just as the
‘war on drugs’ and ‘war on terror’ became pervasive justifications for reshap-
ing urban spaces in myriad ways, the pandemic response—sometimes explicitly
styled as the ‘war on covid’—is already proving to be a powerful legitimising
principle for a range of political projects. As with these earlier urban ‘wars’, the
meaning of the pandemic and related ideas about ‘covid safety’ and the eco-
nomics of recovery are floating signifiers. In Britain, the political and ethical
urgency of responding to the pandemic is being put to a range of uses. A major,
market-oriented revision of urban planning rules that has been in the works
for a long time is now legitimised by the need to (in Boris Johnson’s words)
678
 Editorial: The urban process under covid capitalism

‘build, build, build’ the UK out of the pandemic. Covid is also used as a pretext
for expanding the role of tech firms and algorithms in urban governance. Alter-
natively, some social movements and municipal administrations have used the
pandemic to justify progressive environmental or housing measures, pushed
through on an emergency basis. So the ideological uses of covid are not uni-
directional. But the hope expressed by some earlier in the pandemic that neo-
liberal ideology would be among the virus’s casualties (eg Mason 2020) has not
been borne out.
In a broader sense, the pandemic is creating new formations of the politics of
urban risk. Class, race, and other axes of power are interacting with patterns of
viral transmission and other health inequalities to create complex configura-
tions of hazard and exposure, safety and secession. Yesterday’s gated communi-
ties and offshore enclaves are morphing into networks of bio-economic privi-
lege. At the same time, the consequences of dispossession are becoming greater,
as the buffers that separate precarious housing, precarious work and precarious
health are increasingly worn down. The new social formations and geographies
of risk are being worked into urban space and giving rise to distinctive covid
crisis-scapes (see Vradis 2014).
Finally, it is also clear that urbanisation under covid capitalism is subject to
a renewed politics of uprising. It is remarkable that, in a time when social contact
is dangerous and at times unlawful, mass protest in public space has become,
in some places, almost a routine part of urban life. When in-person meetings
became difficult, many social movements turned to organising through social
media posts, video chat sessions and private messaging groups. But these digi-
tal organising tools have not replaced street protest so much as supplemented it
(Humphry 2020). The iconic examples here are the uprisings in American cities
under the banner of Black Lives Matter, but there have also been sustained pro-
tests in Lagos, Nairobi, Minsk, and many other cities, and campaigns continue
around other issues, such as housing and migrants’ rights. These movements
fit with a now-established pattern of urban protest in the past few decades,
but they tell us that while the post-covid-crisis city is likely to be unequal and
repressive, it will not be acquiescent.
Given its current trajectory, urbanisation under covid capitalism appears
set to become an accelerated, riskier, more authoritarian and yet also a more
contested version of the variety of urban neoliberalism that took shape in the
last decade. The atmosphere of crisis is unlikely to lift any time soon. The pan-
demic will end, but cities changed by it will still face climate emergency and
the accumulated social disaster of years of dispossession and inequality. One
of the ways that critical urban theory can engage with this evolving urban
form is to update its conception of crisis. We need to come to terms with
urbanisation under permanent, interlocking and intersecting crises. Critical
urban scholars have produced excellent work charting the ways in which
urbanisation was changed by the last major round of economic crisis. The
challenge going forward will be to try to make sense of an urbanising world
undergoing permanent, multiple crises, to track both the overdeveloped new
capacities for harm as well as the unpredictable but irrepressible new sources
of hope.
679
City 24–5–6
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Fujita, Kuniko. 2011. “The Global Financial
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