Digital Media and the COVID-19 Urban Crisis: What Can We Learn From the Crowdsourced Mappings in Brazil?

Introduction

In late 2019, an outbreak of pneumonia started in the city of Wuhan, China, rapidly spreading to other parts of the globe. Identified on January 7^th of the following year, the new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) had consequences not only on public health systems, but also on several different aspects of urban life (Gao & Yu, 2020). Coping with the fact that the disease required cross-sectoral collaborations, the solutions were not only in health-related. The establishment of systems for remote work, the intensification of the digital infrastructure and the forming of alliances between local authorities and technology companies to help track the virus’s spread and predict new outbreaks of the disease were just a few out of many and diverse responses to the pandemic. With them, some debates gained strength, such as concerns about the consequences of the surveillance power given, on an emergency basis, to companies and states over people's lives and its implications on privacy and the exercise of citizenship, given repeated violations by companies like Google and Facebook (Zuboff, 2018) and the technocratic approach city officials often take when adopting “smart city” technologies (Söderström, Paasche, & Klauser, 2014).

COVID-19 is not the first pandemic the world faces after the urban era, but it is the first one to cause governments to put in place such large-scale mobility restrictions (both within and between cities and countries) (Askitas, Tatsiramos, & Verheyden, 2020) spread in the context of consolidated internet access.

On the other end of these measures, given the delay - even unpreparedness - of public institutions to respond to community demands emerging from the struggle to contain contagion in cities around the world, is the proliferation of collective endeavors. Individuals of different age groups and demographic profiles have crowdsourced their own solutions for both local and national issues by using online tools to map and respond to pandemic and lockdown-related crises.

In this paper, we assume that the crowdsourced maps made by local networked publics can express matters of concern that are not met by official institutions. In seeking to understand these technological appropriations during the COVID-19 crisis, as suggested by Tarachucky (2021), the research presented here is guided by two questions: (i) how are digital media appropriated by citizens to create these crowdsourced maps? and (ii) what are the different types of crowdsourced maps emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis in Brazil? To answer these questions, this research excludes mappings from official sources of information, such as state agencies or news outlets. In addition, to limit the scope of the research, the locus of analysis is limited to the Brazilian context.

We situate our work on the intersection between urban studies and media studies to make the following contributions: First, we provide an overview of the literature on the use of crowdsourced maps as tools to deal with urban crises. Second, we present an analysis of forty-one crowdsourced maps produced in Brazil between March and June 2020. Each of these maps highlight different community strategies to deal with multiple factors of an issue. Third, we classify these initiatives to provide a set of themes that express matters of concern that might be addressed in the context of similar pandemics. Finally, we reflect on urban studies and media studies in the context of public health crisis, seeing roles for urban planners, designers and policy makers.

The remaining of this paper is structured as follows. Section 2 provides an overview of the impact of COVID-19 on urban space and introduces the concept of crowdsourcing. In Section 3, the research methodology as well as the analysis lens are presented. Sections 4 analyzes the results obtained and Sections 5 and 6 offer an outlook for further research and summarize our key findings.