Post Pandemic Urbanism

Working from home,online shopping, undertourism: the disruptive upheavals caused by theCOVID-19 pandemic challenge architecture and urban planning. New spacesfor action are opening up, but are they being utilized? From dividingtraffic space fairly to urban food policies, from new places for workand recreation to the question on how communities can be orientedtowards the common good: Post-pandemic Urbanism envisions anear future and discusses how cities and their transformative power canhelp to handle this current crisis and those to come.

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.

Emerging infectious disease outbreaks in recent decades have transformed the very nature of urban life worldwide, even as the extent and experience of pandemics are shaped by the planetary urban condition. Pandemic Urbanism critically investigates these relationships in a world faced with an unprecedented global pandemic, the first on a majority urban planet. The authors reveal the historical context of recent infectious disease events and how they have variously transformed the urban social fabric. They highlight the important role played by socio-ecological processes associated with the global urban periphery – suburban or post-suburban zones and hinterland areas of ""extended"" urbanization – bringing to light the increased significance of social media, changing mobility patterns, and new forms of urban governance and pandemic response. The book takes forward theoretical approaches to understanding pandemics grounded in urban political ecologies of disease and landscape political ecology, developing novel insights for post-pandemic urban governance and planning. In doing so, it reveals a paradox at the heart of pandemic urbanism: our urban way of life at close quarters enables contagion to spread easily, yet it also makes it easier to contain and respond to disease outbreaks. Multidisciplinary in its approach and written by three proven experts in the field, this book is an invaluable, accessible primer on the origins, pathways, and management of infectious disease.

Emerging infectious disease outbreaks have transformed the very nature of urban life worldwide, even as the extent and experience of pandemics are shaped by the planetary urban condition. Pandemic Urbanism critically investigates these relationships in a world faced with its first pandemic on a majority urban planet. The authors reveal the social and historical context of recent infectious disease events and how they have variously transformed the urban fabric. They highlight the important role played by socio-ecological processes associated with the global urban periphery – suburban or post-suburban zones and hinterland areas of “extended” urbanization – changing mobility patterns, and new forms of urban governance and pandemic response. The book develops novel insights for post-pandemic urban governance and planning grounded in the quest for social and spatial justice. In doing so, it reveals a paradox at the heart of pandemic urbanism: urban life enables contagion to spread easily, yet at the same time offers unique possibilities to contain and respond to disease outbreaks. Multidisciplinary in approach and written by experts in the field, this book is an invaluable primer on the origins, pathways, and management of infectious disease.

This book offers a unique and timely contribution, informed by responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, to unpack the intertwined challenges that planning needs to cope with in the future. It argues that the pandemic and post-pandemic periods, in their successive waves of restrictions and social distancing, have disrupted ‘normal’ practices but have also contributed to shaping a ‘new normal’. The new normal is emerging, re-configuring, and prioritizing the substantive objects of planning and its governance and participatory processes. This book discusses this shift and presents a collection of episodes and cases from diverse European urban contexts to develop a new vocabulary for describing and addressing challenges, models, perspectives, and imaginaries that contribute to defining the new normal. The book is aimed at scholars interested in urban planning, sociology, geography, anthropology, art, economy, technology studies, design studies, and political science.

To provide for ever-growing populations, cities build new neighbourhoods, transform old industrial areas, and renew the existing urban fabric. The focus now is on energy-neutral neighbourhoods, but in order for these to work, residents must be engaged and the tactics embedded within a broader social policy. This book revisits the neighbourhood as the appropriate scale to build our urban futures: it is small enough to be tangible, large enough to make a difference. Introducing the concepts of neighbourhood arrangements and ecologies, it provides a new perspective on the relation between participants, resources, and rules to spark change and realise future sustainable living.

While designers possess the creative capabilities of shaping cities, their often-singular obsession with form and aesthetics actually reduces their effectiveness as they are at the mercy of more powerful generators of urban form. In response to this paradox, Designing Urban Transformation addresses the incredible potential of urban practice to radically change cities for the better. The book focuses on a powerful question, "What can urbanism be?" by arguing that the most significant transformations occur by fundamentally rethinking concepts, practices, and outcomes. Drawing inspiration from the philosophical movement known as Pragmatism, the book proposes three conceptual shifts for transformative urban practice: (a) beyond material objects: city as flux, (b) beyond intentions: consequences of design, and (c) beyond practice: urbanism as creative political act. Pragmatism encourages us to consider how we can make deeper and more systemic changes and how urbanism itself can be a design strategy for such transformations. To illuminate how these conceptual shifts operate in vastly different contexts through analysis of transformative urban initiatives and projects in Belo Horizonte, Boston, Cairo, Karachi, Los Angeles, New Delhi, and Paris. The book is a rare integration of theory and practice that proposes essential ways of rethinking city-design-and-building processes, while drawing critical lessons from actual examples of such processes.