The COVID-19 pandemic led governments around the world to introduce lockdowns aimed at reducing mobility and limiting social interaction. While these measures were intended to control the spread of the virus, they had far-reaching consequences—particularly in low-income urban areas of the Global South, where close social and economic interaction is fundamental to everyday life.
At a SASNET co-sponsored seminar, Glyn Williams, Professor of Development Geography at Lund University, presented new research examining how lockdowns were implemented and experienced in three Indian cities: Ahmedabad, Chennai and Thiruvananthapuram. The study explores how both authorities and residents responded to the challenges posed by pandemic restrictions.
A central finding of the research is that lockdowns did not operate uniformly. Rather than being consistent and evenly enforced, measures varied significantly between cities and neighbourhoods, and shifted over time.
The study highlights an inherent tension in these contexts. In low-income neighbourhoods, daily life depends on dense networks of social interaction, which are essential for work, care and access to services. Efforts to restrict movement and enforce distancing therefore often conflicted with the realities of residents’ everyday lives.
Williams also examined how governments sought to control these urban spaces, for example through restrictions on movement and various forms of regulation. At the same time, communities actively responded and adapted to the situation, negotiating and reshaping how lockdown measures worked in practice.
The findings point to significant differences not only between cities but also within them. These uneven outcomes suggest that future crisis responses need to be more sensitive to local conditions and grounded in a better understanding of how people live and work in diverse urban contexts.
The seminar underscored that the pandemic was not only a public health crisis, but also a challenge of governance—raising key questions about how policies are implemented and experienced “on the ground” in complex urban environments.