Pandemic in the Metropolis


Book Description

This book brings together reports of original empirical studies which explore the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on urban mobility and transportation and the associated policy responses. Focusing on the California region, the book draws on this local experience to formulate general lessons for other regions and metropolitan areas. The book examines how the COVID-19 pandemic has had different impacts on vulnerable populations in cities. It explores the pandemic's impacts on the transportation industry, in particular public transit, but also on other industries and economic interests that rely on transportation, such as freight trucking, retail and food industries, and the gig-economy. It investigates the effect of the viral outbreak on automobile traffic and associated air quality and traffic safety, as well as on alternative forms of work, shopping, and travel which have developed to accommodate the conditions it has forced on society. With quantitative data supported with illustrations and graphs, transportation professionals, policymakers and students can use this book to learn about policies and strategies that may instigate positive change in urban transport in the post-pandemic period.




Pandemic in Potosí


Book Description

In 1719, a deadly and highly contagious disease took hold of the Imperial Villa of Potosí, a silver mining metropolis in what is now Bolivia. Within a year, the pathogen had killed some 22,000 people, just over a third of the city’s residents. Victims collapsed with fever, body aches, and effusions of blood from the nose and mouth. Most died within days. The great Andean pandemic of 1717–22 was likely the most destructive disease to strike South America since the days of the Spanish conquest. Pandemic in Potosí features the single longest narrative of this nearly forgotten period, penned by local historian Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela, along with shorter treatments of the disease’s ravages in Cuzco, Arequipa, and the outskirts of Lima. The “Gran Peste,” as it was called, was a pivotal event about which Arzáns wrote at length because he lived through it, but also because it was believed to have cosmic significance. Kris Lane translates and contextualizes Arzáns’s account, which is rich in local detail that sheds light on a range of topics—from therapeutics, devotional life, class relations, gender, and race to conceptions of illness, sin, and human will and responsibility during a major public health crisis. Original narratives of the pandemic, translated here for the first time, help readers see commonalities and differences between past and present disease encounters. Designed for use in courses on Latin American history, this concise work will also interest scholars and students of the history of religion, history of medicine, urban studies, and epidemiology.




Metropolis


Book Description

In a captivating tour of cities famous and forgotten, acclaimed historian Ben Wilson tells the glorious, millennia-spanning story how urban living sparked humankind's greatest innovations. “A towering achievement.... Reading this book is like visiting an exhilarating city for the first time—dazzling.” —The Wall Street Journal During the two hundred millennia of humanity’s existence, nothing has shaped us more profoundly than the city. From their very beginnings, cities created such a flourishing of human endeavor—new professions, new forms of art, worship and trade—that they kick-started civilization. Guiding us through the centuries, Wilson reveals the innovations nurtured by the inimitable energy of human beings together: civics in the agora of Athens, global trade in ninth-century Baghdad, finance in the coffeehouses of London, domestic comforts in the heart of Amsterdam, peacocking in Belle Époque Paris. In the modern age, the skyscrapers of New York City inspired utopian visions of community design, while the trees of twenty-first-century Seattle and Shanghai point to a sustainable future in the age of climate change. Page-turning, irresistible, and rich with engrossing detail, Metropolis is a brilliant demonstration that the story of human civilization is the story of cities.




Epidemic Urbanism


Book Description

Thirty-six interdisciplinary essays analyze the mutual relationship between historical epidemics and the built environment. Epidemic illnesses--not only a product of biology, but also social and cultural phenomena--are as old as cities themselves. The outbreak of COVID-19 in late 2019 brought the effects of epidemic illness on urban life into sharp focus, exposing the vulnerabilities of the societies it ravages as much as the bodies it infects. How might insights from the outbreak and responses to previous urban epidemics inform our understanding of the current world? With these questions in mind, Epidemic Urbanism gathers scholarship from a range of disciplines--including history, public health, sociology, anthropology, and medicine--to present historical case studies from across the globe, each demonstrating how cities are not just the primary place of exposure and quarantine, but also the site and instrument of intervention. They also demonstrate how epidemic illnesses, and responses to them, exploit and amplify social inequality in the communities they touch. Illustrated with more than 150 historical images, the essays illuminate the profound, complex ways epidemics have shaped the world around us and convey this information in a way that meaningfully engages a public readership.




Plague and the City


Book Description

Plague and the City uncovers discourses of plague and anti-plague measures in the city during the medieval, early modern and modern periods, and explores the connection between plague and urban environments including attempts by professional bodies to prevent or limit the outbreak of epidemic disease. Bringing together leading scholars of plague working across different historical periods, this book provides an inter-disciplinary study of plague in the city across time and space. The chapters cover a wide range of periods, geographical locations and disciplinary approaches but all seek to answer significant questions, including whether common motives can be identified, and how far knowledge about plague was based on an understanding of the urban space. It also examines how maps and photographs contribute to understanding plague in the city through exploring the ways in which the relationship between plague and the urban environment has been visualised, from the poisoned darts of plague winging their way towards their victims in the votive pictures from the Renaissance, to the mapping of the spread of disease in late nineteenth-century Bombay and photographing Honolulu’s great plague fire in 1900. Containing a series of studies that illuminate plague’s urban connection as a key social and political concern throughout history, Plague and the City is ideal for students of early modern history, and of the early modern city and plague more specifically.




The Pandemic Century


Book Description

Like sharks, epidemic diseases always lurk just beneath the surface. This fast-paced history of their effect on mankind prompts questions about the limits of scientific knowledge, the dangers of medical hubris, and how we should prepare as epidemics become ever more frequent. Ever since the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic, scientists have dreamed of preventing catastrophic outbreaks of infectious disease. Yet, despite a century of medical progress, viral and bacterial disasters continue to take us by surprise, inciting panic and dominating news cycles. From the Spanish flu and the 1924 outbreak of pneumonic plague in Los Angeles to the 1930 'parrot fever' pandemic and the more recent SARS, Ebola, and Zika epidemics, the last 100 years have been marked by a succession of unanticipated pandemic alarms. Like man-eating sharks, predatory pathogens are always present in nature, waiting to strike; when one is seemingly vanquished, others appear in its place. These pandemics remind us of the limits of scientific knowledge, as well as the role that human behaviour and technologies play in the emergence and spread of microbial diseases.




METROPOLIS:


Book Description

Metropolis is an award-winning K-12 project-based ("STEAM") curriculum used by teachers, museum educators, non-profits, architects, urban planners, government agencies and other adults interested in engaging children in community improvement projects, city planning and architecture. The common-core aligned curriculum was developed by John Martoni, an urban planner and elementary school teacher in Southern California. Students are presented with a series of design challenges that take them step-by-step through the process of designing their very own eco-friendly city of the future (while learning about planning issues such as climate change, sustainability and sprawl). Students then apply their new urban design skills to research problems in their real-life community and to propose solutions to local leaders. Metropolis offers students an opportunity to use a creative design process to express their heritage, interests, and ideas while doing this fun, hands-on design project. It is a standards-based, interdisciplinary unit of study that can be easily adapted for students in upper elementary grades, middle school and high school. Language arts, mathematics, health, art, science, and social studies are embedded throughout the curriculum. The new 2022 version has been updated with new activities and graphics. It also includes brand new bonus chapters: -"Planning for Pandemics" (a fascinating look at how urban design has been affected by pandemics throughout human history--including Covid 19). -"Career Corner" (spotlighting the contributions and achievements of people of color and women in the design and building professions) 21st CENTURY SKILLS EMPHASIZED IN METROPOLIS: -Collaboration -Communication -Empathy -Adaptability -Critical Thinking -Creativity -Multiculturalism PEDAGOGIES EMBEDDED IN METROPOLIS: -Project-Based Learning -Design Thinking / Design-Based Learning -STEAM Education (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Mathematics) -Integrated Thematic Instruction -Place-Based Learning




Urban Preppers and the Pandemic in New York City


Book Description

Drawing on urban and community resilience literature, Urban Preppers and the Pandemic in New York City: Class, Resilience and Sheltering in Place offers a detailed qualitative analysis of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on New York City and on the philosophy and practices of the city’s urban prepper subculture. With a special focus on the height of the pandemic in New York, this book considers the city’s unique position as the pandemic’s first epicenter in the United States. It also explores the lived experience of enduring the pandemic as reflections of class division, considering key themes, including the exodus of the wealthy, sheltering in place for the middle class, the inability to leave high-risk neighborhoods for the poor, and sheltering-in-place practices and community resilience efforts by New York preppers. It analyzes the importance of good government and an engaged citizenry in developing an agenda for the city’s continued recovery and its future, underscoring the need for cities to develop disaster management approaches that expand traditional “command and control” models to make space for local knowledge and resources. At its core, Urban Preppers and the Pandemic in New York City: Class, Resilience and Sheltering in Place is about understanding New York City’s pandemic experience and how self-reliance evolves into community resilience outside of institutions. It is vital reading for scholars and students of sociology, anthropology, geography and urban studies with interests in subcultures, ethnography and the sociology of disasters.




The Great Influenza


Book Description

#1 New York Times bestseller “Barry will teach you almost everything you need to know about one of the deadliest outbreaks in human history.”—Bill Gates "Monumental... an authoritative and disturbing morality tale."—Chicago Tribune The strongest weapon against pandemic is the truth. Read why in the definitive account of the 1918 Flu Epidemic. Magisterial in its breadth of perspective and depth of research, The Great Influenza provides us with a precise and sobering model as we confront the epidemics looming on our own horizon. As Barry concludes, "The final lesson of 1918, a simple one yet one most difficult to execute, is that...those in authority must retain the public's trust. The way to do that is to distort nothing, to put the best face on nothing, to try to manipulate no one. Lincoln said that first, and best. A leader must make whatever horror exists concrete. Only then will people be able to break it apart." At the height of World War I, history’s most lethal influenza virus erupted in an army camp in Kansas, moved east with American troops, then exploded, killing as many as 100 million people worldwide. It killed more people in twenty-four months than AIDS killed in twenty-four years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century. But this was not the Middle Ages, and 1918 marked the first collision of science and epidemic disease.




Creative Resilience and COVID-19


Book Description

Creative Resilience and COVID-19 examines arts, culture, and everyday life as a way of navigating through and past COVID-19. Drawing together the voices of international experts and emerging scholars, this volume explores themes of creativity and resilience in relation to the crisis, trauma, cultural alterity, and social change wrought by the pandemic. The cultural, social, and political concerns that have arisen due to COVID-19 are inextricably intertwined with the ways the pandemic has been discussed, represented, and visualized in global media. The essays included in this volume are concerned with how artists, writers, and advocates uncover the hope, plasticity, and empowerment evident in periods of worldwide loss and struggle—factors which are critical to both overcoming the COVID-19 pandemic and fashioning the post-COVID-19 era. Elaborating on concepts of the everyday and the outbreak narrative, Creative Resilience and COVID-19 explores diverse themes including coping with the crisis through digital distractions, diary writing, and sounds; the unequal vulnerabilities of gender, ethnicity, and age; the role of visuality and creativity including comics and community theatre; and the hopeful vision for the future through urban placemaking, nighttime sociability, and cinema. The book fills an important scholarly gap, providing foundational knowledge from the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic through a consideration of the arts, humanities, and social sciences. In doing so, Creative Resilience and COVID-19 expands non-medical COVID-19 studies at the intersection of media and communication studies, cultural criticism, and the pandemic.