Die or Care: Local Responses in Times of Crisis

Mini Virtual Issue – Die or Care: Local Responses in Times of Crisis

This year the best article prize was enthusiastically discussed, as it always is, by the full editorial board of IJURR in our annual editorial board meeting. These discussions provide an opportunity to evaluate the production of the year and where we’d like the journal to go, as well as to openly discuss different criteria of excellence in critical urban research. Last year’s winner, “EXPERT FIXERS: Bureaucratic Informality, Brokerage and the Politics of Land in Mumbai” was greatly appreciated for its deep ethnographic access to how the real-estate field works in Mumbai and the relevance of “fixers”or “brokers”at different stages of the process. Yet, two other papers were among the finalists and struck everyone’s attention because they were two extreme cases of local level crisis management. For this reason, the editorial team decided to launch this short virtual issue, entitled Die or Care: Local Responses in Times of Crisis.

These two articles return to the era of Covid-19 and situate us in two cities located roughly 18,000 kilometers apart: Iquitos, a medium size peripheral extractive city in the Peruvian Amazon and Shanghai, a global megacity and financial hub. In “Mortal Feast,” Wilson (2025) examines how Iquitos—a profoundly unequal and disconnected city—became one of the cities hardest hit during the first wave of the pandemic. Drawing on the lens of urban political ecology, he foregrounds the notion of the zoonotic city and argues that a form of cannibal capitalism transformed the city into a veritable feast of death. Based on twelve-months of ethnography and multiple interviews, Wilson presents a surealist account of how preexisting conditions, intensified during the pandemic and structured by the imperatives of capital accumulation, shaped everyday life in the city’s neighborhoods. These dynamics gave rise to a cruel market for essential services such as oxygen, prolonged the agony of residents, and consigned the urban poor to undignified deaths. His analysis exposes the irony and brutality of a cannibalistic capitalist system in which even the wealthy cannot ultimately secure their own survival.

“Iquitos, Peru” by Julian71444 is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

In contrast, Wang, Wu, and Zhang (2025), in “State Building in Crisis Management,” analyze neighborhood governance, its tensions, and the ways these dynamics generated distinct forms of state-building during the pandemic. This contribution represents the other side of the coin, insofar as it illuminates forms of social organization that can enable more effective responses to crisis. Based on interviews, the authors show how the Chinese state’s relatively flexible roots allowed it to expand its governance toolkit, with practical polities playing a central role in citizens’ everyday lives and penetrating deeply into the social fabric. They also foreground care at the scale of the city and the neighborhood, tracing a shift from a notion of caring for oneself toward caring for the broader community, and highlighting the potential ripple effects of ethically grounded civic commitments.

“Shanghai, China” by szeke is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

This is not to suggest that Shanghai’s crisis response was without problems. To begin with, the elephant in the room is the authoritarian one party government. The risks of surveillance are clear.  The articles signals key tensions, including difficulties in articulating relations between the state and certain neighborhood organizations, and even forms of resistance.

Taken together, these two articles speak to the difference local states can have in managing crises and, more routinarily, to provide wellbeing to residents. As we know, the pandemic unveiled deep inequalities that were already there, while also generating new ones. Yet, in the midst of these structural features, local governance is revealed to be crucial in providing care for residents.

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