ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted daily life in communities and cities around the world. This chapter examines how the rapid onset of these unprecedented conditions inspired novel modes of engaging and knowing around a crisis. In the first months of the pandemic, the authors convened a virtual symposium that brought together a diverse set of actors from academia, government, non-profit organizations, and community groups. The event revolved around a simple question: how do we understand what this pandemic means for cities? The resulting conversations and the organization of the forum to host them were a collective effort to make sense of phenomena that did not fit well within taken-for-granted frames of meaning and were poorly suited to established epistemologies of academic research. The pandemic called for different ways of knowing. To that end, the chapter draws out three characteristics of the Pandemic Urbanism symposium—adaptiveness, collectiveness, and openness—as examples of approaches that are generative of new meaning and insight. The authors argue that the case of this symposium offers lessons for productive sensemaking across knowledge domains in response to many other kinds of emergent socioecological challenges.
