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Libraries are important public spaces through which the social life of the city can be read, like ‘diagnostic windows in society’ (Mehta, 2010: 16) or ‘a barometer of place’ (Robinson, 2014: 13), which can tell bigger stories about the state of cities and nations. This chapter investigates the transformation of public libraries in the United Kingdom (UK) and the Netherlands (NL) during the COVID-19 crisis. In both countries, public libraries were already in some state of crisis when the pandemic hit. Financial pressures, decreasing membership, and digitalization required libraries to reinvent themselves. In the Netherlands, libraries increasingly serve as spaces of encounter facilitating social networks and care (van Melik, 2020). However, being temporarily closed and reopened under strict regulations causes a major setback in the library’s functioning as a ‘social infrastructure’ (Klinenberg, 2018). In the UK, the devastating public impact of COVID-19 takes place on top of an already-existing state of emergency: that of a national public infrastructure crippled by ten years of austerity and hollowing out of library services (Corble, 2019).

This chapter starts with an overview of the national pictures of British and Dutch public libraries before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, after which we discuss two important changes in: 1) the library’s functioning and 2) the nature of librarianship. It is based on interviews with seven anonymized staff members (three in NL, four in UK) and UK public library worker and campaigner Alan Wylie, who sits on the national ‘Cultural Renewal Taskforce’ for steering library services through the COVID-19 crisis.

In The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells (1898) describes the superiority of the Martian assailants over the organization and technology Earth’s civilizations can deploy against them. All the military prowess on Earth fails to dent the invasion. And then, out of the blue, the apparently invincible attack vanishes. Martians have been overcome by a silent and invisible enemy; a deadly epidemic caused by bacteria, which achieved what all the powers of Earth’s civilizations could not. Invading powers are brought to their knees by a microscopic infectious agent. Like the invaders, the COVID-19 pandemic has seemed to be able to overwhelm nearly all the policies adopted to contain it. In the process, the pandemic brings to light flaws in governments’ policy making and fractures running through societies. This time, it is not the Martians whom Earth’s civilizations appear unable to defeat, but the type of microscopic agent (albeit in this case a virus rather than bacteria) that destroyed the Martians in the novel.

The still relatively short history of government reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic is one of policy making in a time of uncertainty. The policy landscape is in a state of flux. The unfolding of the pandemic remains largely unpredictable; it flares up, seems to come under control for some time and then peaks again at an unprecedented level. But it is fair to say that, until now, it is generally the most pessimistic contagion scenarios that have materialized (Roberts, M. 2020). At the same time, knowledge on COVID-19 progresses, causing changes in the perception of the disease and of the likely future of the pandemic. We know more about transmission, the different forms the disease can take, and its long-term health consequences (Rees, 2020).

This series of four books explores the relationship between the COVID- 19 pandemic and a variety of inter- related economic, social, spatial, and racial inequalities that have come to characterize cities around the world in the twenty- first century. Each volume explores a different, yet connected topic within urban studies, geography, and planning. This volume examines divisions within urban communities and societies and discusses to what extent the pandemic has created new inequalities, or amplified existing ones?

During the first wave of lockdowns that quickly spread around the world, images of empty streets, stations, squares, highways, and markets presented a dramatic view of cities that constituted an immediate break from the pre- COVID- 19 era. Often juxtaposed beside images of the same spaces in far busier times, these photographs were almost entirely devoid of people who were otherwise hunkered down in their houses. They gave the impression that everything had changed and that life as we knew it had come to a standstill. They also gave hope of a return to normality, as once- busy places waited patiently for life to return back to the way it was (see The Guardian, 2020).

These images were, however, an overly simplistic, onedimensional representation of cities under lockdown. The reality, in most areas of urban life, was far more complex. Rather than everything changing, the first year of the COVID- 19 pandemic has also demonstrated that much has remained the same: the inequalities that characterized cities before the pandemic have been central to understanding both the unequal impacts of the virus on urban communities and the different ways in which the city has been experienced during the pandemic.

“We’re all in this together” was one of the first rallying cries of the pandemic. It could be heard (and still can be heard) from politicians and businesses. In March 2020, it was also a key message from the World Health Organization (WHO, 2020). However, critical scholarship quickly dismissed this message as it did not reflect what was happening on the ground. As discussed in Volume 1, it is abundantly clear that the COVID-19 pandemic was not a great ‘equalizer’, but rather an event whose impact intersected with a myriad of pre-existing inequalities affecting different people, places, and geographic scales.

While the virus itself does not discriminate between rich and poor, Black and White, apartment or house, its impact has been highly uneven as it finds weak spots in society, amplifying pre-existing inequalities and creating new ones. In many instances, these pre-existing inequalities were amplified by the continued financialization and commodification of housing (Marcuse and Madden, 2016; August and Walks, 2018), and more than a decade of austerity imposed after the 2008–09 financial crisis. Nowhere is this more apparent than in housing. Cuts to housing that disproportionately affected those on low incomes, women, racialized populations, and persons with disabilities were some of the major austerity measures in cities and countries around the world (Vilenica et al, 2020).

Despite these cuts and neoliberal approaches to planning and policy before the pandemic, housing has become a central pillar of governmental and public health approaches to fighting the virus.

The chapters of this volume explored the impacts of the pandemic from three perspectives: their contribution to changes in the way cities operate and in social inequality, and the policy responses the pandemic has prompted. Most contributions to the volume offered snapshots of situations prevailing at a specific time and place in the protracted worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. These snapshots exposed similarities and differences in ways the pandemic intersects with most aspects of urban life and challenges the capacity of institutions. This was also the case of the comparative chapters (Three, Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen, and Twenty), which identified parallels and divergences between responses to the pandemic adopted in different cities. The volume was about the COVID-19 pandemic, the reactions it triggered, and the consequences of both the pandemic and of these responses.

The chapters did not benefit from much hindsight, written as they were in the heat of the pandemic, though importantly, after the initial shock of the first months had already passed. They chronicled the pandemic, responses, and consequences in different locales as they manifested themselves in the winter, spring, and summer 2020, without knowledge of the ensuing evolution of the pandemic and relying on the information on COVID-19 that was available at the time. In this sense, the chapters were nearly written in real time, as the events they narrated were unfolding. Although the volume does not claim to provide a systematic overview of how the pandemic affected cities over this period, its different chapters did portray the urban impact of COVID-19 in different parts of the world and identified major themes related to COVID-19, its social consequences and urban policy and planning responses to the pandemic.

On October 28, 2020, Canada’s Chief Medical Officer of Health, Dr Theresa Tam, stated that the pandemic was exposing existing inequalities in Canada. In a television address, she said that:

‘The impacts of COVID- 19 in this country have been worsened by systems that stigmatize populations through racism, ageism, sexism, and others, who have been marginalized through structural or social factors such as homelessness … Differences [in infection rates] are not random, but all along the lines of populations that have historically experienced health and social inequities … The impacts have been worse for some groups such as seniors, workers who provide essential services, such as those in health care or agriculture, racialized populations, people living with disabilities, and women. The virus didn’t create new inequities in our society; it exposed them and underscored the impact of our social policies on our health status’.

While this may have been a revelation for some people, for the contributors to this volume, and the others in this series, such a direct and unequivocal statement was not surprising.

Such insights are also nothing new to those with lived experiences of these inequalities and injustices. Throughout the four volumes, one of our aims has been to include chapters that amplify these voices by meaningfully, respectfully, and ethically engaging with marginalized communities in order to center their experiences within planning, policy, and political debates about the impact of the pandemic and, importantly, how to respond to it. The findings, analysis, and reflection found throughout this series of books must be a reminder to planners and policy makers that the divisions, inequities, and injustices rendered visible during the COVID- 19 pandemic long predate the virus.

The home is one of the key arenas in which the COVID-19 pandemic has been both fought and experienced. ‘Staying at home’ has been one of the main public health measures used to combat the spread of the virus. However, the ability to follow these guidelines varies tremendously due to both pre-existing inequalities and those that have either been introduced, or amplified because of the pandemic. While housing is central to this volume, it is becoming increasingly clear that discussions regarding housing, land use, urban form, economic development, transportation, and inequality that have long been treated as separate conversations need to be part of the same planning and policy debates. This was evident before the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the need to think across disciplines and themes is more urgent now than ever. The chapters in this volume examine how varied housing issues intersect with work, proximity, ability, class, design, discrimination, and racism to magnify challenges; likewise, chapters in other volumes also discuss housing in reference to communities, public space and planning.

Living in overcrowded housing is strongly correlated to precarious, insecure, or insufficient employment income. Racism and racial discrimination limit the housing opportunities of many people. Many low-income residents in cities around the world have no choice but to reside in (socially and/or spatially) peripheral neighborhoods far from employment opportunities because that is all they can afford. These intersections produce a context where the virus can thrive, but also shapes our variegated experiences with urban life during the pandemic (McKee et al, 2020; Patel et al, 2020).

The virus which causes COVID-19 is an invisible threat that has hugely impacted cities and their inhabitants in numerous ways, as also outlined in other volumes in this series. Volume 1 focused on how pre-existing inequalities within society have augmented and exacerbated when they have intersected with the pandemic; Volume 2 expanded on this theme with a specific focus on housing. Yet, though the virus itself might be imperceptible, its impact is sometimes very visible, perhaps most so in urban public spaces and spaces of mobility, which are the central themes of this third volume. Since March 2020, cities all over the world have restricted the access to, and use of, public spaces, in order to prevent the further spread of COVID-19 (Honey-Rosés et al, 2020). In countries with very strict lockdowns, this resulted in empty streets and marketplaces, and spatial and temporal restrictions limiting the frequency, duration, and reach of outdoor visits.

Although such restrictions generally applied to everyone, they have nevertheless rendered socio-economic inequalities along spatial lines sharper and clearer. Indeed, as Moore (2020) puts it, ‘the division between the private and public space is being played out in this bizarre inability to acknowledge that many do not have private outside space: that they rely on a communal “outdoors” that is now to be avoided and policed’. As such, the COVID-19 crisis added a third process producing the often proclaimed ‘end’ or ‘death’ of public space, as emphasized by Van Eck et al (2020: 375): ‘In addition to the privatisation and commercialisation of public spaces, health-related regulations by local governments impact the nature of public spaces as important meeting places.’ Consequently, 2020 has been proclaimed as the ‘year without public space’.¹

Over the past decades, the academic debate on public space has been somewhat Janus-faced, with researchers generally expressing one of two considerations (van Melik, 2017). One set of authors has depicted public space as a socially open and accessible space where meeting and interaction occur, tolerance for diversity is enhanced, democratic values prevail, and art, theater, and performance take place (for example, Lofland, 1989; Watson, 2006; Valentine, 2008). Concurrent with this romanticized ideal, other authors express a sense of loss or nostalgia about public space being eroded and hence being under threat (for example, Mitchell, 1995; 2003; Kohn, 2004). In his critique of American urbanism, Michael Sorkin (1992) even went so far as to herald the ‘end of public space’. Authors in this second camp have painted a rather pessimistic picture of modern urban life; one that is characterized by neoliberal urban planning, consumerism, restrictive security measures, and social exclusion.

In a similar vein, chapters in this book by a mix of scholars (in law, criminology, geography, sociology, planning, architecture, and so on) have depicted both bleak and promising developments concerning public space and mobility in times of a global pandemic. With increased use of parks and pedestrian-oriented developments such as cycling and walking (see for example Chapters Sixteen and Eighteen), public spaces appear to be rediscovered by both policy makers and users alike. Public spaces are high on the urban planning and policy agendas, as Whitten and Massini (Chapter Nine) demonstrate when discussing London’s policies for greening the city.