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Our first priority was the well-being of and care for each other in an ongoing traumatic and uncertain context. A key aspect of our response was to support each other emotionally, reflecting both on how to nurture intellectual development, but also how to balance the demands of our work with the need to provide domestic responses to the crisis. This crisis has specially affected those who bear the brunt of care responsibilities, reflected, for example, in the declining numbers of journal submissions from women, and those without close networks of support or who live alone. Within academia, the crisis affects those who perform invisible care work, from supporting other colleagues and students, to delivering strategic and administrative activities that enable our collective work. We centred a culture of care which must, first of all, recognise and value those activities. Alongside weekly online meetings, we instigated online socials and weekly drop-ins to ensure that colleagues had regular contact with each other and spaces to share the emotional burdens brought about by the pandemic. During the early phases of the pandemic, we provided specific support to Urban Studies Early Career Researchers across the Faculty of Social Sciences, with on-line meetings where peer-to-peer support could be enacted and sustained. 

Second, the scale and severity of Covid-19 meant that we needed to look again at our assumptions and adjust to a new urban context. How is action on climate change in cities impacted by the current crisis? What are the impacts of emergency crisis responses by national governments on the prospects for devolution, citizen participation and participatory urban governance? What inequalities are made visible and/or invisible and with what consequences for life on the margins? How will the intensification of digital technologies and automation impact on urban systems, infrastructures and ways of living? We designed a reflective process to provide the context for systematic grappling with the changing landscape of research and the urgent urban questions that matter. A new series of ‘Friday Collectives’ was set up to enable staff, associates and visitors from across the world to discuss international experiences, local responses, the intersections between the current societal condition and our thematic priorities, and what this means for changing conditions for knowledge production. 

Third, we have also had to actively redesign our projects and mobilise our positions and privilege to respond to the current context. Different spaces for engagement and research opened up and closed down, for instance, in terms of our projects to undertake applied work in cities in Africa or our work with housing activists around the world. Within these processes we sought to centre the re-profiling of resources to support community partners and maintain a commitment to equitable partnerships. 

Finally, as the Covid-19 crisis and remote working have continued, new challenges have emerged in a context of reduced funding, ever changing travelling restrictions and unequal access to vaccines in different countries. In response to this uncertain landscape, we have carved out regular online spaces for peer-to-peer support and learning where we can help each other grappling with day-to-day issues concerning international partnerships, research ethics, international field work and redesigning research projects. Some of our initial themes have focussed on redesigning projects, the new geographies of research, technologies for and of participation, and infrastructures for collective work.

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