https://doi.org/10.3828/tpr.2020.77 Simin Davoudi and Emma Ormerod Viewpoint Hope and despair at the time of pandemic Simin Davoudi is Professor, Newcastle University, Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Henry Daysh Building, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, United Kingdom; Emma Ormerod is Research Associate, Newcastle University, Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Henry Daysh Building, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, United Kingdom; email: simin.davoudi@ncl.ac.uk; emma.ormerod@ncl.ac.uk It was the best of times, it was the worst of times … it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. (Dickens, 1859, 1) With these words, Charles Dickens opens his most political novel, A Tale of Two Cities. Two hundred years later, we cannot but agree that, ‘In short, the period was … like the present period’ (Dickens, 1859, 1), when hope and despair are inescapably entangled in the unfolding of a global pandemic. At the time when lives and livelihoods are lost, streets are eerily empty, shops are shuttered, schools are closed, cities are locked down, people are isolated from their loved ones and the spread of the COVID-19 virus is spiralling the world into multiple interconnected crises, many of us are searching for what Rebecca Solnit (2004) calls ‘hope in the dark’. But what is hope? Where can we fnd it? And is hope a social force for change? We will return to these questions after a brief account of despair whose roots go deeper than the current pandemic and its tragic consequences. The worst of times On 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 pandemic, stressing that ‘we’re in this together’ (WHO, 2020). The trope, which is often elevated at the time of crisis, evokes diferent emotions and serves diferent purposes. On the one hand, it is an expression of solidarity and a call for global cooperation. On the other hand, it is an invocation of the parity of suferings and sacrifces. In the context of the pandemic, it is used to suggest that the virus does not discriminate and can afect porters and cleaners as well as princes and prime ministers. However, this narra- tive overlooks the profoundly unequal health, social and economic impacts of the pandemic. More importantly, unlike the virus itself, which is novel and unknown, its uneven health, social and economic impacts are neither new nor unexpected. They mirror the inequalities which have been on the rise in the last few decades and