Pandemic In The Metropolis

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.

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.

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.

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.

The book provides a global perspective of local government response towards the COVID-19 pandemic through the analysis of a sample of countries in all continents. It examines the responses of local government, as well as the responses local government developed in articulation with other tiers of government and with civil society organizations, and explores the social, economic and policy impacts of the pandemic. The book offers an innovative contribution on the role of local government during the pandemic and discusses lessons for the future. The COVID-19 pandemic had a global impact on public health, in the well-being of citizens, in the economy, on civic life, in the provision of public services, and in the governance of cities and other human settlements, although in an uneven form across countries, cities and local communities. Cities and local governments have been acting decisively to apply the policy measures defined at national level to the specific local conditions. COVID-19 has exposed the inadequacy of the crisis response infrastructures and policies at both national and local levels in these countries as well as in many others across the world. But it also exposed much broader and deeper weaknesses that result from how societies are organized, namely the insecure life a substantial proportion of citizens have, as a result of economic and social policies followed in previous decades, which accentuated the impacts of the lockdown measures on employment, income, housing, among a myriad of other social dimensions. Besides the analysis of how governments, and local government, responded to the public health issues raised by the spread of the virus, the book deals also with the diversity of responses local governments have adopted and implemented in the countries, regions, cities and metropolitan areas. The analysis of these policy responses indicates that previously unthinkable policies can surprisingly be implemented at both national and local levels.

FINALIST FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION'S FIRST NOVEL PRIZE An intimate, elegant, and deceptively sinister story of what a woman will do to take control of her life. A woman aspiring to a contemplative life faces innumerable obstacles--cultural, financial, sexual, and metaphysical -- that stand between her and the freedom to live as she desires. In "a strangely ageless world somewhere between Emily Dickinson and David Lynch" (Blake Butler), a cleaning woman at a museum of art nurtures aspirations to do more than simply dust the paintings that surround her. She dreams of having the liberty to explore them in writing, and so must find a way to win herself the security and time to use her mind. She escapes her lot by marrying a rich man sympathetic to her "hobby," but having gained a husband, a house, high society, and a maid, she finds that her new life of privilege is no less constrained. Not only has she taken up different forms of time-consuming labor -- social and erotic -- but she is now, however passively, forcing other women to clean up after her. Perhaps another and more drastic solution is necessary? Reminiscent of a lost Victorian classic in miniature, yet taking equal inspiration from such modern authors as Jean Rhys, Octavia Butler, Clarice Lispector, and Jean Genet, Indelicacy is at once a ghost story without a ghost, a fable without a moral, and a down-to-earth investigation of the barriers faced by women in both life and literature. It is a novel about seeing, class, desire, anxiety, pleasure, friendship, and the battle to find one's true calling.

The Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918-19 was the worst pandemic of modern times, claiming over 30 million lives in less than six months. In the hardest hit societies, everything else was put aside in a bid to cope with its ravages. It left millions orphaned and medical science desperate to find its cause. Despite the magnitude of its impact, few scholarly attempts have been made to examine this calamity in its many-sided complexity. On a global, multidisciplinary scale, the book seeks to apply the insights of a wide range of social and medical sciences to an investigation of the pandemic. Topics covered include the historiography of the pandemic, its virology, the enormous demographic impact, the medical and governmental responses it elicited, and its long-term effects, particularly the recent attempts to identify the precise causative virus from specimens taken from flu victims in 1918, or victims buried in the Arctic permafrost at that time.