Governing the Sick City: Urban Governance in the Age of Emerging Infectious Disease

Abstract

Based on a case study of the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak in Toronto, Canada, this article suggests that we may have to rethink our common perception of what urban governance entails. Rather than operating solely in the conceptual proximity of social cohesion and economic competitiveness, urban governance may soon prove to be more centrally concerned with questions of widespread disease, life and death and the construction of new internal boundaries and regulations just at the time that globalization seems to suggest the breakdown of some traditional scalar incisions such as national boundaries in a post-Westphalian environment. We argue that urban governance must face the new (or reemerging) challenge of dealing with infectious disease in the context of the "new normal" and that global health governance may be better off by taking the possibilities that rest in metropolitan governance more seriously.

An Uncertain Risk: The World Health Organization's Account of H1N1

“…Academic literatures surrounding the application and implications of the IHRs are well-developed. These include analyses from the viewpoint of securitisation and biorisks (Atlas and Reppy, 2005;Caduff, 2012;Cooper, 2006), and the role and effect of surveillance in relation to the contemporary emphasis on pandemics from biopolitical and other perspectives (Bashford, 2006;Keil and Ali, 2007;Martinez, 2000). The IHRs, and the WHO's role within them, are also pivotal to the understanding of the WHO's risk narrative.…”

Global public health policy transfer and dengue fever in Putrajaya, Malaysia: a critical discourse analysis

“…There is a long history of discursively connecting poverty with poor sanitary practice (and therefore poor health). In the bacteriological city of the colonial era (Gandy 2005), technocratic public interventions (including water and sewer systems) aimed to reduce or eliminate disease outbreaks by using hygienism -the separation of the clean and the dirty and the promotion of cleanliness as a social goal -as a strategy for economic development and demographic growth (Keil and Ali 2007). Piped water systems created material and symbolic separation between clean, healthy populations and an unclean, unhealthy, unsanitary underclass -an association that perpetuates inequalities in water access and use in many post-colonial cities to this day (Swyngedouw 2004, Kooy andBakker 2008).…”

Disaster and emergency management systems in urban areas

“…Beyond the above-mentioned conceptual discussion on metropolitan/urban governance in emergency management, several studies applied the concept to urban settings as well. Keil and Ali (2007), for example, examined the 2003 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak in Toronto, Canada, and analyze the factors that constitute urban governance today. Their research shows that human mobility is weaker than the mobility of pandemic diseases, which in turn causes significant threats to the public health.…”