Epilogue: reflections on the pandemic and urban societies

Abstract

This paper analyzes the social and political conditions that made Latin America a global epicenter of the pandemic in 2020-2021. It addresses the issue of the impacts of patterns of urbanism on the development of the pandemic, considering urban hierarchies, interurban relations, and relations between cities and rural interiors, in addition to the structuring of socio-spatial inequalities within metropolitan cities, the consequences of high levels of economic informality, and forms of governance and political conjunctures. Adopting Boaventura Santos's perspective that the pandemic is an additional crisis added to more than four decades of crisis linked to the dominance of neoliberal financialized capitalism, the article investigates indications that the pandemic has strengthened movements in search of alternatives, discussing the possibilities and limitations of forms of popular resilience and resistance in the light of the current social and political power structures. It concludes with some reflections on what the pandemic teaches us about the transformations of urban life that would be desirable in a post-pandemic era.