PEAK Urban during the Coronavirus Pandemic

In the new Coronavirus reality, our annual PEAK Urban retreat, which was this year hosted by the fantastic EAFIT University in Medellín, Colombia, already feels like a lifetime ago. Held between 3 and 7 February 2020, the retreat brought together our researchers from around the world in order to participate in active collaborative learning focussed on writing about the city.

But while for most of us, and for most of the world, the Coronavirus seemed at that time still a somewhat distant threat, for our Chinese partners at Peking University it was both very present and very real. Indeed, with the Hubei region in lockdown since 23 January, and with the Chinese authorities taking increasingly drastic steps around the rest of the country to contain the spread, we received word on 27 January from research leads Changchun Feng and Guangzhong Cao that they and the rest of the PKU team would not be able to join us in Medellín.

The news quickly brought things into sharp relief. The first question we asked ourselves, of course, was whether we should still go ahead with the retreat. After all, not only were we worried that it would be unfair to proceed in the absence of our largest partner in terms of researchers (15 team members were planning to travel to Medellín), but some of us were also concerned that by travelling at this time we would perhaps expose both ourselves and others to unnecessary risk. Meetings were therefore held and advice sought, and with the all clear from the University in terms of travel, we decided to press ahead.

Arriving in Medellín a few days later, the Coronavirus soon seemed very far away indeed, as we set about enjoying a packed programme of meetings, workshops, roundtables, training sessions, capacity building exercises, and field visits to some of the city’s neighbourhoods in which our researchers had been working. The absence of our Chinese partners, although keenly felt, was also not as total as we had first anticipated, as key members of the PKU team were able to join us via online video conferencing.

Now, while life in China is slowly getting back to normal, it is Europe, Africa, South Asia and the Americas that find themselves having to operate in an era of social distancing, social isolation, and lockdown. All five of the partner institutions that make up PEAK Urban are shut down, but the work must go on.

How have lockdowns impacted the research and work being done as part of the PEAK Urban project? Well, in the first instance, working as an international consortium over the past two years has taught us that, while some parts of the project will have to be temporarily put on hold (most notably, research being done in the field in cities like Bangalore, New Delhi, Cape Town, Shanghai, Beijing and Medellín), there is still quite a lot that can be accomplished. 

Our annual in person retreats are vital to learning about each others’ research and building interdisciplinary communication skills (and trust) among researchers from a wide range of geographical and disciplinary backgrounds, but now that we have laid that groundwork, we can continue learning and collaborating using remote technology.

Academia is one of the most international of industries, with UK institutions especially embedded in the global higher education system. Over 35% of academic staff in the UK are foreign nationals. Over half of all UK published papers are based on international collaborations. Around 36% of all postgraduates in the UK are international students.

The international nature of our staff, students and work means that academia is deeply reliant on international travel. On an international research project like PEAK Urban, researchers frequently fly internationally to carry out field work, meet with colleagues and attend conferences. But on an international research project that aims to contribute solutions to a rapidly urbanising future in the developing world, we are also acutely aware of how our working practices contribute to global warming.

Here at PEAK Urban we have already become familiar with communicating and presenting our research remotely, through online workshops and meetings. We see this period of social distancing as an opportunity to test out and improve these online ways of working, with the hope that in future, more workshops and conferences can be held online, providing less destructive and more accessible opportunities for us to disseminate our work to a broader range of people.