From social infrastructure to pandemic resilience?: learning from and with low-income urban 6

Faced with the asymmetrical distribution of Covid’s effects in cities, low-income communities have a critical role in building local resilience (UN-Habitat 2020). Globally, both pandemic and control measures have severely affected residents’ ability to meet basic needs (Simon et al. 2021), particularly relating to food, services (e.g. health, education, childcare), and access to reliable information. State-led pandemic responses have often fallen short of the appropriate and effective interventions needed at the local scale (Sverdlik & Walnycki 2021). Community-based organisations (CBOs) have played a decisive role in pandemic response in many low-income neighbourhoods, mitigating vulnerabilities by responding to gaps in basic needs provisioning. The pandemic’s critical juncture offers transformative potential for CBOs, revealing them as key actors at neighbourhood and urban scale. Yet little is known about their enhanced role in pandemic response, or exactly how this affects community capacity to withstand future crises (Cannon 2008).