Going online: organizational coordination for the care of urban greenspace virtually during the COVID-19 pandemic

Keywords: stewardship, collaboration, governance network, greenspace, pandemic
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 35

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare a number of inequities and disparities in neighborhoods, cities, and landscapes globally. The civic sector (non-governmental organizations and community groups) have reorganized and rerouted objectives and tasks to address many of these inequities around food, health care, and shelter. Many of these groups are intertwined with greenspaces as social infrastructure, providing resources such as access to and care of greenspaces, critical for physical and mental health. The initial shift to lockdowns and virtual communications caused groups to adapt to new internal and external-facing modes of work and communication. To understand more about how these organizations engaged in digital conversations with other stewardship groups and the broader public during the pandemic, we examined social media communications of known stewardship organizations from the 2017 Stewardship Mapping and Assessment Project (STEW-MAP) survey and collaboration network in New York City before and during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. We examined how groups communicated and coordinated using Twitter, focusing on changes in posting frequency, retweets, and content. We applied an unsupervised topic modeling approach to identify general themes during content analysis. From these data, we applied theories and concepts from the social movement literature, to identify the role of social media’s contribution to different ways of organizing with individuals and groups through interlinking, assembling, and augmenting actions. We conclude with a discussion of how social media tools can enable, and sometimes limit, stewardship groups’ efforts in an urban setting.