Abstract
There is a saying that we learn from the past to better prepare for the future. Facing a pandemic of a scale that many of us would not have expected, we are already alarmed about the inevitable reality of another one’s arrival in the future. In which ways can we better “wrap up” the current pandemic and inform the next generations? The collection of case studies in Epidemic Urbanism: Contagious Diseases in Global Cities, edited by Mohammad Gharipour and Caitlin DeClercq, epitomizes historical experiences that can serve this purpose.
The book starts with an elegantly written prologue by the prominent scholar Sandro Galea on pandemics and urban health. In his piece, Galea reflects on the experience of COVID-19 and synthesizes how physical, social, and service environments shape the well-being of citizens and urban life in general. Galea also enlightens us by highlighting the reciprocal relationship between cities and diseases and encourages more scrutiny on how urban environments evolve with pandemics.
As the title suggests, this collection focuses on the central role of cities, where epidemics and other contagious diseases are more amplified. In that regard, it is organized with four sections surrounding different themes of urbanism: politics and management of urban governance, culture and society of urban life, performance and change of urban infrastructure, and interventions and implications of urban design and planning. These themes cover various segments of urbanism squarely and create a comprehensive blueprint to inquire into the social nature of epidemics.
The urban governance section reviews policies and interventions in response to urban epidemics. One case that many of us can connect with is how government campaigns for vaccination and quarantine were politicized during smallpox outbreaks at the beginning of the twentieth century in the United States. It is interesting to see, at that time, city administrators’ attempts to “combat the epidemic show that the problems were financial, social, and structural rather than matters of party ideologies regarding public health” (pp. 73–74). Another case study surfaced around the same time in multiracial, colonial Kenya, where social hierarchy shaped policy responses that discriminated against people of color. “The colonial state and European settlers took advantage of the ongoing public health crisis to justify racially discriminatory practices such as segregation” (p. 80).
In the section about culture and society, we are reminded how the Jewish neighborhood in Prague experienced spatial differentiation and enclosure during an outbreak of plague in 1713 (p. 92). A minority population, the Jews not only suffered from loss of life caused by the epidemic itself, but also from hardship that originated from discrimination across religious and ethnic lines, which lingered even after the outbreak. It is clear from the Jews’ experience that discriminatory quarantine as a public health measure drew a physical border along the neighborhood boundaries as well as another invisible line separating a group from other citizens.
The book reveals dynamics of social inequality that are inherent not only in an epidemic but also in the lives of marginalized populations. During the campaign to eradicate smallpox in twentieth-century Baghdad, Iraq, rural migrants were often seen as the vector of disease, but it was rarely reported that waste and sewage were dumped into their communities from affluent neighborhoods (p. 138). For consequences beyond the epidemic itself, these campaigns also witnessed the demolishing of migrants’ dwellings and settlements, paving a way to convert valuable lands to profitable real estate development.
On urban design and planning, the case study of cholera in Tokyo, Japan during the late nineteenth century demonstrates how crucial infrastructural issues can be when it comes to controlling the spread of diseases. In the Tokyo case, the government sacrificed sanitary projects of improving water supply including underground sewers to fund other priorities such as military expansion. Rather than investing in sanitary facilities, the city authorities relied primarily on “the isolation of the infected in hastily constructed and often inadequately staffed quarantine hospitals” (p. 266) in which seven out of ten patients died. Interestingly, such quarantine measures were seen again in some countries (e.g., China) during the COVID-19 outbreak.
Geographic coverage of this collection is truly global, which reminds us how broad and extensive pandemics’ impact can be. While the readers will appreciate the editors’ effort to arrange this collection with distinct sections, it is obviously challenging as many pieces seem to bridge other themes. It also illustrates that eliminating epidemics and reducing their social consequences will truly be a collective effort from all segments of society. In this regard, there is a promising stage where sociology as a discipline can contribute to the theorization and decomposition of epidemics’ social origins and impacts. It will not be surprising to see more interdisciplinary work in these efforts that bring together social scientists, public health practitioners, urban designers, and policy-makers as we continue combatting contagious diseases across the globe with an equity focus in mind.