Dalia Amellal

My project uses the recent COVID-19 crisis as a research context for exploring the notion that post-quarantine urbanism is threatening the existence of anonymous spaces. Due to its social productivity, urban anonymity and anonymous social relations are becoming increasingly undesirable. From a political stand-point, anonymity is seen as threatening the ability to exercise control at a large scale. For example, the recent pandemic has shown the ways in which the state largely benefits from conditions that fragment individuals, a phenomenon that confirms Lefebvre's finding that "separation breaks the unifying power of urban form." The impossibility of a crowd means the impossibility of anonymity, resulting in the slow death of the urban. In my thesis, I seek to demonstrate the ways post-quarantine urban conditions pose challenges to anonymous spaces.