The futures of cities worldwide are currently being contested, and calls to “imagine urban futures” have come to mean reimagining life in relation to a range of ongoing and anticipated crises including COVID-19.

"This perceptual shift —understanding garbage collectors as caretakers—was not only happening because I was suddenly going to Parque do Flamengo everyday, but also because at this moment we are experiencing a heightened awareness of what it means 'to take care' of our bodies and of each other."

Parsing the entanglement of Italian urbanism and campus design in the post-1968 moment, Francesco Zuddas recounts a set of spatial responses to the popular discontent that had crested by way of academia onto Italy’s national sociopolitical scene.

The global pandemic has occasioned an impulse to think in monumental terms – totality, catastrophe, portal. This essay commits to a different reading that stops the rush of planning and forecasting, projecting and forecasting. It offers collective life as an analytic that keeps the focus on the ways in which the urban majority is trying to survive and cope within structures of inequality that now bear both the new imprint of COVID-19 while equally holding the continuities of older forms of distancing and exclusion.

Simone argues that the practices for living with instability will be found in those places with an infrastructure for moving forward despite sustained marginalization. It is in these places that we can see the infrastructure for making livable spaces out of unideal and less privileged circumstances.