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The Crowd and Covid-19 (Crowds, Affects, Cities Seminar Series)

Wednesday 10th March, 2021

13:00-14:00, Zoom (registration required)

Prof Colin McFarlane, Department of Geography, University of Durham.

Wednesday 10th March 1pm, Zoom

The relation between the crowd and the city has been historically pivotal to our understanding of cities. How might we understand the impact of the pandemic on those relations? The pandemic has had radical impacts not only on the material geographies of crowds, but on the position of the crowd in popular and political imaginations. While state and municipal governance sought to ‘organise out’ the possibilities of crowd densities in the city throughout the pandemic, all kinds of anxieties and concerns became attached to the image and idea of the crowd. The longer-term implications remain unclear, but in this presentation I draw on ongoing research on the relationship between the pandemic and density to describe some of relations that are being attached to the crowd, and reflect on the potential consequences both for cities and urban research.

This event is part of the 2020-2021 seminar series Crowds Affects, Cities, jointly convened by the Centre for the History of the Emotions and the QMUL City Centre. To register your interest, please contact one of the convenors: Tiffany Watt Smith (t.k.watt-smith@qmul.ac.uk), Regan Koch (r.koch@gmail.com), and Pen Woods (p.woods@qmul.ac.uk).