Contagious Cities

Abstract

The outbreaks of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) that unfolded at various locations throughout the world represented the first collective threat to public health that was amplified by the processes and structures of our contemporary globalized society – such as, the compression of time and space and increased linkages between various cities of the world. In this article, the global outbreak of SARS in 2003 is used as an empirical referent to discuss the implications of infectious disease spread among and within cities under the conditions of globalization. To capture the uniquely dynamic qualities associated with infectious disease outbreaks under globalizing conditions, we suggest that conventional accounts of the spatial diffusion of pathogens incorporate topological principles that are sensitive to such properties as: fluidity, flows, mobility and networks, that now play a critical role in disease diffusion. If the rise of farming was . . . a bonanza for our microbes, the rise of cities was a greater one, as still more densely packed human populations festered under even worse sanitation conditions. (Diamond 1999, 205)The explosive increase of world travel by Americans, and in immigration to the United States, is turning us into another melting pot – this time, of microbes that we previously dismissed as just causing exotic diseases in far‐off countries. (Diamond 1999, 206)

The somatic-security industrial complex: theorizing the political economy of informationalized biology

“…Some have framed the Western health security and biosurveillance agenda in even less glowing terms than simple commercialism, wherein colonial approaches to contagion in the 'hot zones' have been replaced by managing disease spread through de-territorialized networks in which the surveillance of particular groups can be undertaken through the collection of relevant data. Such methods of surveillance and social control have recently intensified and further conflated the association of race/ethnicity with disease because of the development of a hypervigilance and a paradigm of suspicion after the terrorist attacks of 9/11all of which may have furthered the racialization of SARS as a 'Chinese disease' (Ali & Keil, 2007) It seems questionable as to whether this surveillance provides any of the wider advantages to resource poor countries, wherein investments in surveillance lead to improving other elements of national health systems (Chyba, 1998;Henderson, 1998;Heymann, 2003). As Stephen Morse, and Roberts and Elbe have noted socalled syndromic surveillanceor infodemiology and infoveillanceis demanding and out of reach in terms of informational technology resources, training and necessary investments in screening and reference capacities (Keller et al, 2009;Morse, 2007Morse, , 2012)and is more often than not non-diagnostic (Roberts & Elbe, 2017).…”

Pandemic cities: biopolitical effects of changing infection control in post‐SARS Hong Kong

“…Land flight and urbanisation of the poor in the global South has also meant an increase in comparatively vulnerable inhabitants (Ravallion et al 2007). The threat of a globally emerging pandemic derives its plausibility in part from the fact of increasingly dense connections, ongoing exchanges and rapid travel between the major urban centres of the world (Rodwin and Gusmano 2002; Ali and Keil 2007). Accordingly, the urban scale is targeted again as the predominant site for measures of infection control, surveillance and prevention (WHO 2009).…”

Geography and global health

“…Life science research in the shape of the role of pharmaceutical companies in the geography of HIV/AIDS in Africa was considered by Craddock (2007) and food safety is attracting considerable attention across human and physical geography (Ericksen 2008; Jarosz 2009). It has been the domain of emergent and re‐emergent diseases that has captured most attention (Ali and Keil 2007; Emch and Root 2010). The context for this burgeoning research is a set of debates that have been taking place for the last two decades or so over the broader societal framing of infectious disease.…”