Under Quarantine in a City Project: Stories of Fear, Family, Food, and Community: Stories of Fear, Family, Food, and Community

Although less vulnerable to housing precarity and eviction, US public housing residents have been directly impacted by the failure of urban infrastructures and resources that the pandemic has now amplified. This chapter takes a bottom-up approach to examine how poor urban residents have experienced their daily life within and through the crisis. Using photo-voice techniques, we were able to document some of the hardships and events that residents of the Sun Valley public housing neighborhood (Denver, CO) experienced during quarantine. Residents’ narratives reveal the many ways the COVID-19 pandemic has affected people’s lives at a personal and a collective scale and highlight how community support, services and infrastructure are necessary for ensuring residents can both survive and overcome public health crises. The stories and knowledge collected from these photographs and interviews can be used to rethink the provisions, systems, and structures necessary for a more just and equitable urban infrastructure.