When top-down infrastructures fail: spaces and practices of care and community under COVID-19

Abstract

Throughout this article, we focus on the lives and experiences of residents in the Sun Valley public housing project in Denver. During the stay-at-home orders, the Sun Valley residents–an economically impoverished yet diverse community that includes refugees, Black and LatinX families, single-parent households, and individuals who are permanently disabled–faced extremely precarious conditions. COVID exposed and exacerbated the already failed infrastructures in Sun Valley, but within this failure, radical openings emerged, new connections surfaced and alternative practices developed among the residents leading to vernacular infrastructures of care. To understand and highlight these vernacular infrastructures, we utilized a combination of photography and interviews to understand 17 residents’ and key community support actors’ experiences during the initial stay-at-home orders from March to June 2020. From this data, we argue that, through community practices and relationships, Sun Valley residents’ and community support networks addressed the crisis and uncertainty by developing vernacular infrastructures of care.