Flashes of Urban Affects: Written Records for the First 750 Days of COVID-19

Urban settings saw huge changes during the pandemic, such as the emptiness of urban public spaces during lockdowns, and the ways urbanites fulfilled that emptiness. I began a journal back in March 2020. It reports family life, my view about sociopolitical events, professional expectations, includes descriptions of urban settings and of urban-related situations. This chapter aims at sharing everyday scenarios that, resulting from individual experiences, are also common situations experienced by other people living in urban settings. It aspires to inscribe some written records during COVID-19 pandemic. This way, the chapter might be a contribution about the urban experience of the pandemic. The methodology for this chapter is content analysis of my personal journal, in an autoethnographic exercise. It considers the dimension of urban life, including categories related with urban situations, suburban experiences, urban mobility, and urban interactions, in an effort of trying to give sense to a rather illogical situation of living under a pandemic.