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.




COVID-19 and Cities


Book Description

This book brings together the work of more than 25 scholars from different parts of the world who analyze the challenges posed by the new coronavirus and how it can transform the lives of the cities. Through 19 chapters organized into three sections - experiences, responses and uncertainties - the authors offer a novel perspective about the resilience of the metropolis to face the most important sanitary crisis in the twenty-first century. History shows that cities can innovate and change profoundly in a response to disasters or after suffering an intense crisis, such as a pandemic or dramatic local spread of infectious diseases. In many cases, cities evolve to better urban systems, as literature based on the resilience perspective suggests. From this perspective, this book is a unique contribution to the academic discussion offering a multidisciplinary approach to analyze the impact of COVID-19 in the cities.







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.




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.




COVID-19 and Cities


Book Description

This book brings together the work of more than 25 scholars from different parts of the world who analyze the challenges posed by the new coronavirus and how it can transform the lives of the cities. Through 19 chapters organized into three sections - experiences, responses and uncertainties - the authors offer a novel perspective about the resilience of the metropolis to face the most important sanitary crisis in the twenty-first century. History shows that cities can innovate and change profoundly in a response to disasters or after suffering an intense crisis, such as a pandemic or dramatic local spread of infectious diseases. In many cases, cities evolve to better urban systems, as literature based on the resilience perspective suggests. From this perspective, this book is a unique contribution to the academic discussion offering a multidisciplinary approach to analyze the impact of COVID-19 in the cities.




Pandemic Recovery?


Book Description

This timely book offers an integrated and pragmatic approach to understanding recovery from all types of shock. Whilst particular focus is given to identifying and exploring various aspects of recovering societies in the context of COVID-19, Pandemic Recovery? is framed with a wider appreciation of other societal challenges, most notably anthropogenic climate change.




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.




Coping with the Pandemic in Fragile Cities


Book Description

This book explores the effects of covid-19 crisis on cities and urban areas and proposes approaches and solutions to invert the pandemic's negative impact. The covid-19 crisis has had significant impacts on public health, on the everyday lives of millions of people, and on the use of urban spaces at all levels. All over the world, cities have been at the forefront of a crisis that have worsened socio-spatial inequalities between regions and inside urban areas. The book examines three aspects of the connection between pandemic and urban issues: the relevance of spatial and territorial variables in the explanation of pandemic dynamics and consequences in fragile cities; the assumption of radical uncertainty as the conceptual framework for a new approach to urban planning, in a phase of raise of public investments; and the design of urban policies aimed at facing the material and symbolic effects of pandemic on the practices of use of spaces and places, in a context characterized by a plurality of populations and forms of life.




International Perspectives on Public Transport Responses to COVID-19


Book Description

International Perspectives on Public Transport Responses to COVID-19 International Perspectives on Public Transport Responses to COVID-19 examines the pandemic response of transport policymakers around the world and analyzes what can be learned to prepare for the next epidemic—or any other critical event that threatens transportation services. It combines theoretical analysis with a compendium of country-focused case studies to provide scientific evidence and decision-making support for the actions that each transportation official must make going forward. This book begins with Part 1, a thematic and comparative section on response and recovery efforts. It provides insights into topics such as mitigation strategies and preparedness of the public transport sector to epidemics prior to COVID-19; responses during the COVID-19 pandemic and recovery from it; public transport services in urban and rural areas during the pandemic; and social (or physical) distancing and any other protective on-board measures. Part 2 then offers a set of international case studies, wherein various authors from different countries review their governments’ and operators' responses. Each chapter is guided by a set of common research questions based on disaster mitigation theory. Part 3 then focuses on learnings and comparative analysis from the COVID-19 pandemic for future epidemic mitigation strategies in the public transport sector. Governments, public transport authorities and operators, as well as students and researchers will learn what has and has not worked well during the COVID-19 pandemic. These insights will help them to mitigate, prepare, respond, and recover from unexpected disruptive events like pandemics in the future. Combines case studies (country-specific chapters) and analysis (thematic chapters) to enable a deeper understanding and provide different perspectives Puts a clear focus on public transport, the most affected mode of transport amid the COVID-19 pandemic Analyzes the COVID-19 responses in the public transport sector through the perspective of disaster management