It was April 2, 2020. Approximately half of the world’s population was in some form of lockdown now, and many more were experiencing various types of restrictions to movement, routine, and daily lifestyle.
On the same day, Euronews published the article ‘Coronavirus: Half of humanity now on lockdown as 90 countries call for confinement‘
The graphic posted below is US American journalist Dan Rather’s tweet ‘Maybe when this is all over, we can widen the sidewalks.’
For me, the pandemic is not a slowly distant fading memory. It is a window of time that I believe we need to study to enhance our crisis management approaches as well as resilience strategies.
With those aims in mind and using one of my now favorite methodological approaches of interviews and surveys to gather ‘residential narrative’, I have a pilot interview series activated to document in-depth discussions with people, about aspects of their pandemic experience (whether there was a lockdown in the country of their residence at the time or not) with a focus on issues of urban and public space, mobility and neighborhood experiences.
This is a pilot for what I envision as a much more substantial project.
The pilot interviews are helping me analyze and refine the series of questions as well as plan to design what I intend to be a psychological and cerebral (maybe even emotional for some) experience of memory and reflection for individual interviews as well as group workshops, anchoring back to those ‘pandemic memories’ to help contribute to insights on supporting localism and best practices and barriers to neighborhood (and overall town / city) resilience from multiple dimensions including environmental, social and spatial.
Are you interested in taking part in a pilot interview? Contact us here.
-Annika