Windows on the pandemic city: inequalities, policies and resistance

Abstract

The article deals with the relationship between social inequality and the different ways in which the Covid-19 pandemic reached the urban population in Brazil. I start from an observation made from the social isolation of the researcher in the city and from the possible windows to access the world, making the route from the windows of the apartment to the windows of the screens, their multiplicity and their restrictive frameworks. From these fragments of images and sounds, headlines and news, posts on social networks, I seek to create a more understandable screen about the ways in which different urban populations were affected by the virus, in terms of illness and death; the ways in which the State, with its different apparatus, agents, services, while aiming at building life policies, insists on sovereignty practices and death policies; and, finally, local ways of dealing with the pandemic, through self-care and self-organization and resistance in peripheral neighborhoods and communities in some capitals of the country and its peripheries. From this mosaic emerges cities, the city, as a territory of inequalities, resistance and struggles for the right to exist.

Keywords: Pandemic. Inequality. Policies. Resistances.