Loss and the City: A Special Issue

Abstract

Introduction The introduction to this special issue on “Loss and the City” was put together throughout the spring, summer and fall of 2020 when the world grappled with the devastating and bewildering spread of COVID-19. As the epigraph suggests, our world and our cities looked radically different in lockdown and the sense of loss and potential loss was palpable. In the midst of a pandemic, it seemed somewhat obscene to be continuing with the quotidian work of thinking, reading and writing and we did so in fits and starts, knowing that we were incredibly fortunate to spend even a bit of time contemplating the intellectual side of issues that we care about so deeply. We were often raw and overwhelmed but we were also driven by a sense that, in this world of suffering, we might be able to say something useful about loss, cities and how the two have intersected and overlapped historically. And, truthfully, on some occasions writing became a form of refuge—an opportunity to escape from daily fatality rates, government negligence, stories of economic exploitation, vulnerable isolation, and dashed hopes and dreams. This special issue on loss and the city emerges out of Loss: A Symposium held at McGill University in the spring of 2018.2 At the time, our intention was to bring various academic sub-fields into conversation, particularly scholars working in Critical Refugee Studies and Indigenous Studies. Sensitive to shared histories of loss and displacement, as well as concerns about the unrelenting marginalization and neutering of any agency on the part of those who have encountered and lived through loss, the symposium was deliberately structured to think about loss as more than an end story. We were prompted by four questions: What is loss? What causes loss? What remains? And, what is beyond loss? These questions were posed distinctly to the symposium’s participants and yet they ultimately overlapped in terms of scope and content. Significantly, people largely gravitated to the question of “what remains?”, wanting to engage with this question