ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has considerably disrupted familiar notions of dense and heterogeneous urban life and space. This chapter delineates how attempts to contain the SARS-CoV-2 virus have raised fundamental questions about urbanity and its taken-for-granted socio-spatial foundations, as well as about the barely commemorated heritage of past pandemics. Putting urban studies and heritage studies in a productive dialogue, it is argued that the COVID-19 pandemic has unveiled a blind spot of both areas of scholarship that has been illuminated by a silent group that has hardly played a part in the discourse on cities and heritage so far, but whose importance has become particularly apparent during the pandemic: essential workers. The argument is developed in three steps: First, we critically discuss the heritage of urbanity as a particular amalgamation of the urban and urbanism. Second, we pinpoint how gaps in the heritage of urbanity were uncovered by the pandemic. Third, we discuss the consequences of these insights for Critical Heritage Studies with a focus on subaltern groups in order to sketch out a more inclusive future research agenda for heritage studies and possible public arenas for a post-civic recognition of the marginalised.
