Community Social Work

URBAN COVID: "The Long Tail of COVID’s Urban Epidemiology: Inequality, Mobility and Informality as Pandemic Vectors"

urban covid

Urban COVID   studies community responses during the lockdown in Madrid's neighborhoods. The project has used mixed methods to explore the relationship between vulnerability, disease incidence, and community resilience.

“..., we propose a detailed description that focuses on the situated, emerging, and processual dimensions that shaped the community geographies of the pandemic. Drawing on the anthropology of science and technology, we analyze these geographies and introduce the concept of 'community assemblage' to complement and expand the analyses of the pandemic that have highlighted the importance of social capital (Fraser et al., 2022), resilience (Carter & Cordero, 2022), and community participation (Cubillo-Llanes et al., 2022). We describe three types of assemblages (connection, approach, and linkage), illustrating them with neighborhood case studies. The study of assemblages allows us to emphasize the importance of Community Social Work in managing urban crises, not only as an intervention and psychosocial support tool but also as a reservoir of methodological, sociotechnical, and territorial inventive capacities...”

Jiménez, A. C., Jiménez, T. T., & Cisneros, Á.                            
Los ensamblajes comunitarios de la COVID-19 en Madrid.                           
Cuadernos de Trabajo Social, 2024, vol. 37, no 2, p. 253.                           
Instituto de Lengua, Literatura y Antropología (ILLA) - CSIC

Main objectives of the Urban COVID project

  1. A deeper understanding of the relationship between socio-spatial inequalities, public health, and community resilience. This will be achieved through the geographical visualization of COVID incidence distributions, vulnerability indices, and Social Services responses for each of the neighbourhoods studied.
  2. To enable the comparison and deeper understanding of the qualitative data collected during the research.

Tasks carried out in the project:

  • 1) The cleaning and analysis of the databases from Madrid's Social Services related to the care provided and demands received from the population during 2020.
  • 2) The geographical representation of this data on a series of maps of the city's neighbourhoods and districts, enabling comparisons with existing maps of disease incidence on the one hand, and socio-economic vulnerability on the other.

P.I.: Alberto Corsín Jiménez - ILLA. CSIC

alberto

He has studied groups and communities involved in 'free culture,' including hackers, architects, engineers, and cultural managers. As a result of this research, he has worked on the concept of 'free urbanism,' which differs from public urbanism and community urbanism that defined urban processes in the 19th and 20th centuries, read more...