On a bright winter weekend morning I took New York City's 7 train, which runs through Sunnyside and Jackson Heights in Queens. Both are historic neighbourhoods whose architectural legacies bear the marks of early American urban planning, with garden apartment complexes constructed for the expanding middle classes of New York City as well racially restrictive covenants. More recently, they have been home to waves of arriving immigrant groups. Housing countless essential workers, neighbourhoods such as these have borne a disproportionate brunt of losses, of lives and livelihoods. Their stories became tragically well known the world over as New York City faced the deadly onslaught of Covid-19 in the spring of 2020.

In Queens and boroughs with similar demographic profiles, networks of neighbours began to come together soon after the March 2020 lockdown began, to create mutual aid networks, some informal, others more organised. By the summer of 2020, with Black Lives Matter protests underway, the pandemic and its decimation of civic life and services began intersecting more directly with racial justice issues and other concerns of folks who had long been marginalised. Mutual aid groups around the city began to mobilise on social media platforms, informing followers about the locations and timings of daily protests, as well as creating awareness about opportunities to volunteer and to donate time, goods and services. They also served to inform those who needed these goods and services.

Gregory Afinogenov writes: 'Buying something off of Everlane or Amazon doesn't make you a member of a community, no matter how much the marketing department tries to convince you otherwise. Yet in the past year, as our social life has withered under the pressures of quarantine, we've been forced to move our real-life communities online – and often to seek out new ones as well, on social media or even through mutual-aid spreadsheets advertised on websites and lampposts across the country. Who gets to decide what an online community is and how it functions? The owners of online platforms always portray their proprietary databases and algorithms as fundamental to our user experience. But what if, instead, we focused on ourselves as users, with all our contradictory impulses, and looked for ways to liberate ourselves?'[1]

What do groups using social media and other messaging platforms such as slack say about the evolution of the category of user? If platforms are apparatuses, in the sense explored both by Foucault and Agamben, can they support alternative action regimes or counter-cultures? These broader questions underlay my own ethnographic forays into the worlds of Queens, an exploration which began whilst planning a new academic unit bringing anthropology and architecture together at the Spitzer School of Architecture in New York.

As part of my research, I began to scrape social media platforms in search of the community fridge, an object that I began hearing about in the Fall in conversations with Catherine Grau, community partnership manager and Gianina Enriquez, community organiser at the Queens Museum. Community fridges are simply refrigerators filled with donated food, managed by volunteers who usually live in the neighbourhood. An early article about them described community fridges: 'At community refrigerators, anyone is welcome to take whatever they want and leave behind food they don't need, like extra produce. Many volunteers who clean and stock the refrigerators daily ask local restaurants and stores to donate unused or unsold food items instead of throwing them away.' [2]

The fridges are 'hosted' by local restaurants, businesses or even homeowners, plugging them into their personal electric supply. The first fridge was set up in the Bed-Stuy neighbourhood of Brooklyn by an organiser with the activist group In Our Hearts, with a fridge he had sourced for free through the Craigslist platform (see above). Communications with networks for food donors including local food coops, restaurants with unsold food, grocery stores, restaurant suppliers and individuals with extra food to donate usually take place on different social media platforms such as Slack, Facebook, Signal and Instagram. Since the first fridge appeared at the beginning of the pandemic, community fridges have appeared all over the city and the world. As objects, they represent the physical manifestation of online networks, an eruption of virtual, digital traces literally onto sidewalks, another manifestation of platform urbanism. More recently, they have also been serving as gathering spots, agora of sorts, for organised teach-ins about topics ranging from mutual aid to organising for justice to community fridge etiquette.

Community fridges, while fixed in space, gather groups of people who are essentially mobile, coming and going at their convenience, whether to collect food or to volunteer. However, drop-offs and donations increasingly require coordination and cooperation amongst core volunteers, especially as the volumes of food arriving at these fridges continues to increase. An army of mobile volunteers has also emerged to keep the fridges stocked. The fridges are like a traffic signal at the crossroads of the physical and the digital, the real and the virtual.

At the Jackson Heights Community Fridge, Rose Salane, an artist friend working to create an archive of the Latinx experience of Covid in NYC, and I met Camila Caceres, the vivacious young organiser of the Jackson Heights community fridge. Camila grew up in the neighbourhood and was friends with another young woman, Tahia, who was already working with and for neighbours. They received a donated fridge but had to find an appropriate host for the fridge. Camila explained that 'it can be overwhelming' to have a fridge at your location, especially if you are a mom and pop business and you have to deal with electricity payments and your landlord. Implying that the fridge 'comes with a lot' means adjustments have to be made to become a public space, to be prepared for anything that might come along. The Jackson Heights fridge is hosted by Queensboro, a restaurant that Camilla describes as a 'gentrifying business' or one whose owners are able to stand up to their landlords and to pay any penalties that the fridge might incur.[3]

The Jackson Heights fridge core group is small – '6-7 of us, all brown, all from the neighbourhood,' Camila told us. But the whole network has around 90 volunteers who come 'every fifteen minutes to clean and restock the fridge from personal donations, or usually we have volunteers helping with bigger bulk pickups and distributions that need to be unloaded.' Fridges like this one started to pop up as food pantry lines started to extend and snake around blocks. Pantries, which are organised largely by established charities, non-profits and community groups depending on federal relief, became especially important at the beginning of the pandemic. There is little to no control over the food received through federal aid and it often comes from centralised distributors needing to empty their own warehouses. Fridges, however, are crowd-funded and also more eclectic in their sourcing, often following messages that alert them to places where food is being given away or about to turn to waste. Like ATMs, the fridges function 24/7 but with no strings attached, no account to be given, and no fees to be paid. Like banks they function on trust but a trust that does not require a deposit and indemnity of identities.

Camilla explained that organising the volunteer network is done through a calendar where people sign up for shifts when they can – 'it's community led and mutual aid, we don't want people to feel like they have to or they are forced to… we don't necessarily want people to feel like it's a job or an obligation – it's something they want to do out of their love for the community and also because they have the time and ability to do so…'. She gave a special shout-out to the Fridge Girls, a group of Afro-Latinx women from The Bronx who began buying food and distributing it to fridges throughout the city. Their end-of-year post on Instagram shares that journey from a collective 'running into each other' and being 'so fired up' that they somehow ended up becoming distributors, the vital link between communities of need and communities of desire.