Paper short abstract:

Analyzes the challenges and solutions regarding living spaces and their uses during the COVID19 lookdown. Based on the photographic and textual self-documentation from students from the UAM Cuajimalpa, a public university catering to low-income residents mainly living on the outskirts of the city.

Paper long abstract:

The aim of this work is to shed light on the actual challenges and solutions found by regular people regarding their living spaces and their uses during the COVID19 lookdown. This knowledge has the potential to inform the responses by architects and other built environment specialists looking for housing solutions.

The self-documentation of intimate spaces brings us closer to home life, a realm that is otherwise difficult to access. The city is usually narrated from its streets, parks, shops, or transport, but rarely from the experience lived in the intimacy of the house. This paper is based on the photographic and textual documentation gathered by seventy students from the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana campus Cuajimalpa in Mexico City. The UAM-C is a public institution catering to low-income residents mainly living on the outskirts of the city. The students recorded their living spaces and the transformation happening to their domestic lives between February 2020 and May 2022, in the first phase of the COVID19 pandemic. During that period, the city was lived from within: interior spaces and their uses changed and acquired new, unexpected meanings. Dining rooms became offices; kitchens, potted gardens; entrances, sanitizing stations; and bedrooms, classrooms, or gyms. The research takes advantage of a selection of representative stories and testimonies to create a series of vignettes that illustrate how students and their families adapted spaces and their ways of life during confinement.