Stories of Riverside in the Pandemic: Episode 2: The future of community - how are we imagining community differently now?

Marking the third anniversary of the COVID lockdown, I'm using this blog to reflect on this time and to point towards the audio archive Doorstep Revolution, a project I was part of putting together as part of Gentle/Radical.

The second episode reflects on dreams of community, how people expressed desires for a greater sense of local community in Riverside. It was those moments of staying at home, of going out and clapping on a Thursday night during the lockdown that made people think about local community more. Everyone's attention was on the very local, as there was no where else we could go. And one of the positive things of this time was feeling a greater sense of connection to the local neighbourhood. Did we build on that? Or has life now gone back to "normal"? I think, sadly, it mainly has gone back to "normal" with people engaging less with their neighbours. Maybe we missed an opportunity. The work of "doing community" is really tough, long-term work, and even though lockdowns in some way gave this a boost, it wasn't enough by itself to stop us living very isolated individualistic lives. How do we reflect on this now three years later?

You can listen to Episode 2 of Doorstep Revolution here (Scroll down to "Episode 2") or look through a transcript here.

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