As a practice, as a model, and as a civilizational project, “building” always indexes a transition: the craft and praxis of volumetric and spatial growth; the epistemological res extensa of projectionism and control; and the longing for expansion and accumulation. As Robert Moses once noted, “Those who can, build; those who can't, criticize.” If the operation of building indexes a transitive movement, then, what form of un-transition does unbuilding signal? What might it mean to inhabit the intransitive?

In this brief concept-paper I wish to invite readers to rethink the urban condition as an intransitive form. I use the term intransitive as a conceptual sensibility for describing modes of inhabitation that are caught in transit between antithetical and otherwise unreal poles: between growth and degrowth, between the near-Norths of modernization and the near-Souths of peripheralization, between transitional futures and critical pasts (Escobar 2015). Not unlike intransitive verbs, it is in the nature of the intransitive not to separate actions and objects, but to sense and cause to drift a mode of worlding all along (on the intransitive, see Corsín Jiménez and Estalella 2023, 206–9).

Here I want to bring to the forth the importance of the intransitive by zooming-in on the nature of urban life during pandemic lockdowns. All over the world lockdowns brought cities to a halt. Transportation flows, distribution networks, space-time rhythms of inhabitation, energy tides, infrastructural chokepoints, logistical pressure-points, municipal and social services: the city’s traditional grids, corridors and theaters of operation were massively shut down, shifted or realigned. Whereas the built environment of cities hardly changed during lockdown, their urban conditions were veritably unbuilt and overhauled. The city as we knew it effectively disappeared and a different city temporarily popped up in its place.

What did these urban interregnums teach us? What forms does the intransitive anticipate?

For over four years I have been studying the logistical and prophetic geographies that swayed over Madrid during its three-month lockdown. Across the world, biostatistical and epidemiological models had anticipated vulnerable neighborhoods to be the worst hit by the pandemic due to the compound effects of health and socioeconomic inequalities. Building on decades-long research in public health and urban sociology that has overwhelmingly established the correlation between health disparities and area-level deprivation, pandemic models had reasonably predicted that neighborhoods with overcrowded housing, precarious or informal employment, and local demographics of floating populations would take the toll of the pandemic. In the case of Madrid, however, they were wrong.

Madrid ranks first among European capitals with the highest spatial segregation of socioeconomic inequalities, and the city suffered one of Europe’s highest excess mortality rates during the first wave of the pandemic. The city’s unequal geography was therefore ripe for epidemiological catastrophe. However, to everyone’s surprise, its most vulnerable neighborhoods registered substantially lower incidence rates and COVID cases than their wealthier counterparts. How did this come about?

For months, our interdisciplinary team of epidemiologists, sociologists, and anthropologists searched for an answer to this surprising and unexpected irregularity. Epidemiologists wished to advance cautiously because not all pandemic data was equally robust. They insisted that during lockdown only people who were hospitalized were tested for COVID, so incidence rates were differently reported across different neighborhoods and pandemic waves. On the other hand, some of us in the social sciences were keen to explore an analysis demonstrating that the solidarity and counter-logistical networks of community first-respondents had not only alleviated the pandemic’s socioeconomic impact, but had had public health effects too. But epidemiologists resisted this extrapolation because we had no data points they could compare or relate to. It was one thing to say that community logistics had alleviated poverty, they noted, but it was very different to argue that they had helped reduce contagion too.

We were therefore caught between data weakness and data incommensurability. Only very slowly it dawned on us that we were both—epidemiologists and social scientists—operating under various sets of ceteris paribus assumptions. We had both conventionalized the geographical underbellies of the city so that our everyday declinations of the probable, the futural or the adventitious found accommodation in ready-made theories of governance and the urban. For instance, in their calls for proceeding cautiously and only using data robust models, public health specialists and epidemiologists were narrowly making their analyses speak to the canons of liberal urbanism and governmentality, most famously through their declinations of socio-geographic determinants of health. For our part, in our own romance with the logistical inventiveness and improvisational capacities of community responses, we, social scientists, had made our stories chime a little too neatly with the theories on the reticular affordances of social movements and community organizations in disaster scenarios. We were both taking certain structural geographies of the city as given. For epidemiologists and social scientists, then, “modeling,” “solidarity,” or “improvisation” functioned as conceptual proxies for covering-up the transition between crisis and recovery scenarios. These operators helped filled the brackets between pre- and post-pandemic urban normality. Perhaps our pandemic stories were not quite contributing to the building of the city, as Robert Moser had imagined it, but they had certainly found solace in its conceptual shadows.

In earnest, few if any analyses to date have dwelt on the radical and unprecedented time-space blackholes that lockdowns brought into being. During this time transitions came to a halt and urban geographies were ontologically upended. Habits, rhythms, and habitus of endurance, urgency, or the unexpectable shifted or were recalibrated. The fabrics of intimacy and exhibition, necessity and concern, were rewoven and redeployed across different corridors, passages and lattices of refuge, interaction, or sustenance.

In Madrid, for example, novel geographies surfaced driven by an intensification of attention. Community activists and social workers spent hours on the phone taking calls from lonely and anxious elderly people or single-parent families. These calls helped chart out radar sounding topographies of neighborhood affliction and distress. Mutual aid networks took shape as they grafted themselves onto these intensified matrices of attention. Care ceased to function as a transitive verb (care for) and became a logistical geography for an intransitive city instead.

Stories of intransitive urbanism during lockdown remain largely untold. Yet they carry a lesson, I believe, about how we may wish to rekey the languages of description for future worlds.