Combining Safety and Equity in the post-Covid City: New Trends between Local Policies and Bottom-Up Practices. An Introduction

All the data and the debate clearly show that we are living in an “urban time”. That is true not only as the majority of the world population lives in the urban areas (UnHabitat, 2022) but also for the prominent impact of city in social, cultural, economic, political and environmental terms. Changes in the city are constant and fast. If we focus on them within the frame of neoliberal urbanism, the transition to fordism to post-fordism (Savage & Ward, 1993) and the one from managerialism to entrepreneurialism (Harvey, 1989) are two clear examples. Cities can more and more be seen as “growth machines” (Molotch & Logan, 1987), with an increasing orientation to attract investments as well as the “creative class” that make them profitable (Florida, 2003). The “tourism turn” that is occurring in many urban areas is one of the clearest indicators of this trend (Ashwort, 2012). On the other side, inequality and social exclusion seem to intensify with dramatic impacts on the urban realm (Short, 2018; Hagen & Elliott, 2021). In terms of local management, however, we are also seeing an important increase of urban governance practices, with the rise of urban bottom-up social movements, both local and connected to broader ones (Blanco & Leon 2017). Several forms of civic engagement seem to be addressed to foster the right to the city in its multiple forms: affordable housing, against touristification, sustainability, public spaces, migrants and refugees, etc. More recently, the Covid-19 pandemic affected in particular urban settings (Martinez & Short, 2021), and it has furtherly contributed to questioning the way in which urban government and planning are organized. This debate is still very vibrant, with some authors who point out that Covid-19 “just” accelerates trends that were already working in the city, and other ones who stress that the change is not so dramatic as it seemed to be until a couple of years ago. Again, tourism is clearly an example: the loss of arrival and overnights in 2020-2021 has been recovered in 2023 and almost all the problems connected to this sector are persisting. All these elements suggested us to propose this monographic issue. The concrete opportunity, however, was given by the IV Midterm Conference of the European Sociological Association Research Network 37 - Urban Sociology, entitled Seeing Like a City/Seeing the City Through that took place at the Georg Simmel Center for Metropolitan Research of the Humboldt University Berlin from the 5th to the 7th of October 2022. Nine presentations have been selected by the RN37 Board and proposed for a peer-review process. Some of them explicitly consider the Covid-19 pandemics, but other ones have been considered as well because they focus on some topics that are definitely part of urban debate today, both inside and outside of Europe. One of the contributions, moreover, is also focused on some extra-European cases, and the interview has been done, with an urban scholar who lives and works in the United States.