In this guest post, Dr Rae Baker discusses the results of a research project on tenants’ struggles during the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on the newly published book Dispatches from the Threshold. The project was funded by a USF’s Pandemic and Cities grant.
The Pandemics and Cities funding opportunity from the Urban Studies Foundation took seriously the multidisciplinary scholarship and research partnerships that emerged in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the critical observations and questions that arose out of this still-present and evolving public health crisis in our collective history. As of February 2025, the Center for Disease Control has recorded 4,934 deaths in the United States resulting from COVID-19 in the first six weeks of 2025 alone and 1,223,562 total deaths in the US resulting from COVID-19 since 2020. Pandemics and Cities responded to a moment when the urban question was once again stopped short and necessarily required to adapt to unknown and rapidly evolving circumstances of uncertainty; how will city dwellers and workers, public services, movements for social justice, and multi-scalar urban markets weather the first pandemic of the urban age?
Our plan for the edited volume that we envisioned in 2021 was to document the fierce and necessary work of scholar-activists, tenant organizers, legal aid workers, court watchers, encampment defenders and critical urban planners fighting for housing justice amid the COVID-19 pandemic. It was an endeavour we anticipated to be a collaborative and worthy undertaking. Now in its final form, this edited volume reads as a playbook for responding to housing crises in unprecedented times, offering insightful reflections on actions taken by activists, tenant organizations, and legal aid workers while the need for defending neighbours, clients and fellow tenant activists from eviction was at its highest amid the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The opportunity to assess and reflect on our actions in times of crisis provides an opportunity to understand the impact of our actions in real-time and to think strategically about how these interventions are contributing to more liveable, liberatory, and radically different cities.
This volume’s contributors detail the barriers faced in their struggle for housing justice, the limitations and strengths of the political organizing or mutual aid configurations that supported their efforts, and how those engaged in the long and necessary work of fighting for tenant rights and a right to housing may be able to plan more strategically in preparation for potential future systemic challenges. In this way, Dispatches from the Threshold is a living archive that acknowledges its time and place in the movement for housing justice and tenant struggle that is part of an enduring history that will continue to evolve as the housing questions we face in the future present new challenges, and likely more of the unaffordable and questionably habitable conditions of worker housing Engles predicted to be a perpetual crisis among the urban working class.
The multi-disciplinary, tactical diversity and range of political tendencies that coalesce in this volume reflect the invaluable strengths of urban studies, a field dedicated to the study of the forces and relations that influence and shape urban life- and its informing and influenced peripheries. While the common theme this texts’ chapters bring into sharp focus is the struggle for the right to housing, these dispatches document varied activist and community-based methodologies, radical approaches to policy amendments, challenges to the legal frameworks that protect property ownership above and beyond the rights of renters, and liberatory relational approaches to addressing homelessness and encampment support networks. With contributors from multiple continents and varied configurations of activist, tenant, and academic collaborations, Dispatches is inclusive of perspectives that can inform transformative thinking and learning for practitioners of any stripe.
The Urban Studies Foundation’s Pandemics and Cities grant made possible our ability to value the time and knowledge of each of the book’s contributing authors and artists through distributing honorariums. In some cases, honorariums directly paid the rents of contributors, while others funnelled these funds into immediate needs within tenant organizations. The Urban Studies Foundation’s mission to promote knowledge, exchange, and mobilization in the field of urban studies was proven in the foundation’s support of this book. The funding of this project was a true acknowledgement that we are all capable of being urban practitioners and community-based researchers, regardless of our educational qualifications, who are capable of contributing to the transformation of our cities through mobilization, direct action, ad hoc research, and collaboration, be that through academic, activist, or other equality important positions of support and solidarity. The editors and contributors of Dispatches are grateful for the generosity of the Urban Studies Foundation. We are excited to present this book to all who will read it, with the hope that something can be learned and be of use in the ongoing struggle for housing justice. We also hold fast to the responsibility that the struggles and lessons of this volume can be built upon as we adapt to the changing conditions of housing (in)justice that guides our ongoing activist, academic, legal, and neighbourly work of actualizing more just and liberatory cities.