IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/csrchp/978-3-030-78941-1_9.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

A Resilient Approach to Social Solidarity During Covid-19. Evidence from Smart Communities in South African Cities

In: Resilience, Entrepreneurship and ICT

Author

Listed:
  • Maria Rosa Lorini

    (University of Cape Town)

  • Jorge Marx Gómez

    (Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg)

Abstract

Covid-19 exacerbated and brought to light some of the inequalities and vulnerable conditions of millions of people in the big metropoles of South Africa. The communities of Cape Town responded in a timely way to the risks associated with the pandemic to limit its dangerous potential and find solutions to support people in critical situations. These are due to existing critical medical conditions (TB and HIV rates), impossibility to practice physical distancing (particularly in the informal settlements of the cities), food insecurity related to poverty and increased rate of unemployment, lack of running water and hygiene possibilities, and potential violence increase (particularly related to gender). Information and Communication Technology (ICT) solutions, particularly connected to the use of social media, allowed for deploying support respecting physical distancing as well as security and medical measures. At the same time, the solutions and approaches oriented to social solidarity amongst communities created the bases for reducing the social divide. The formation of networks of support which reached out for the needs of the most vulnerable people, proved to be problem solving oriented and succeeded in developing cooperative approaches that involved groups of people who have previously never encountered. Considering the still deep digital divide, Cape Town could not count on Smart Cities’ approaches to fight the pandemic, but it proved it could rely on Smart Communities responses. The case study displays the potential to use ICTs to connect, debate, suggest, and deploy solutions to respond in a resilient way to a crisis. The responses highlight the role of e-Participation from the bottom to combine solutions offered by ICT and reactivity and creativity of communities. The approaches further opened the way to the reduction of the social divide in one of the countries with the highest inequality rate in the world.

Suggested Citation

  • Maria Rosa Lorini & Jorge Marx Gómez, 2021. "A Resilient Approach to Social Solidarity During Covid-19. Evidence from Smart Communities in South African Cities," CSR, Sustainability, Ethics & Governance, in: Jantje Halberstadt & Jorge Marx Gómez & Jean Greyling & Tulimevava Kaunapawa Mufeti & Helmut Faasch (ed.), Resilience, Entrepreneurship and ICT, pages 185-203, Springer.
  • Handle: RePEc:spr:csrchp:978-3-030-78941-1_9
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-78941-1_9
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:csrchp:978-3-030-78941-1_9. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.