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.

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.

The face of the pedestrian safety crisis looks a lot like Ignacio Duarte-Rodriguez. The 77-year old grandfather was struck in a hit-and-run crash while trying to cross a high-speed, six-lane road without crosswalks near his son’s home in Phoenix, Arizona. He was one of the more than 6,000 people killed while walking in America in 2018. In the last ten years, there has been a 50 percent increase in pedestrian deaths. The tragedy of traffic violence has barely registered with the media and wider culture. Disproportionately the victims are like Duarte-Rodriguez—immigrants, the poor, and people of color. They have largely been blamed and forgotten. In Right of Way, journalist Angie Schmitt shows us that deaths like Duarte-Rodriguez’s are not unavoidable “accidents.” They don’t happen because of jaywalking or distracted walking. They are predictable, occurring in stark geographic patterns that tell a story about systemic inequality. These deaths are the forgotten faces of an increasingly urgent public-health crisis that we have the tools, but not the will, to solve. Schmitt examines the possible causes of the increase in pedestrian deaths as well as programs and movements that are beginning to respond to the epidemic. Her investigation unveils why pedestrians are dying—and she demands action. Right of Way is a call to reframe the problem, acknowledge the role of racism and classism in the public response to these deaths, and energize advocacy around road safety. Ultimately, Schmitt argues that we need improvements in infrastructure and changes to policy to save lives. Right of Way unveils a crisis that is rooted in both inequality and the undeterred reign of the automobile in our cities. It challenges us to imagine and demand safer and more equitable cities, where no one is expendable.

Temporary and Tactical Urbanism examines a key set of urban design strategies that have emerged in the twenty-first century. Such projects range from guerrilla gardens and bike lanes to more formalised temporary beaches and swimming pools, parklets, pop-up plazas and buildings and container towns. These practices enable diverse forms of economic, social and artistic life that are usually repressed by the fixities of urban form and its management. This book takes a thematic approach to explore what the scope of this practice is, and understand why it has risen to prominence, how it works, who is involved, and what its implications are for the future of city design and planning. It critically examines the material, social, economic and political complexities that surround and enable these small, ephemeral urban interventions. It identifies their short-term and long-term implications for urban intensity, diversity, creativity and adaptability. The book's insights into temporary and tactical urbanism have particular relevance in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has highlighted both the need and the possibility of quickly transforming urban spaces worldwide. They also reveal significant lessons for the long-term planning and design of buildings, landscapes and cities.

This authoritative Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of research into urban politics and policy in cities across the globe. Leading scholars examine the position of urban politics within political science and analyse the critical approaches and interdisciplinary pressures that are broadening the field.

This edited collection examines the development of Atlantic World architecture after 1492. In particular, the chapters explore the landscapes of extraction as material networks that brought people, space, and labor together in harvesting raw materials, cultivating agriculture for export-level profits, and circulating raw materials and commodities in Europe, Africa, and the Americas from 1500 to 1850. This book argues that histories of extraction remain incomplete without careful attention to the social, physical, and mental nexus that is architecture, just as architecture’s development in the last 500 years cannot be adequately comprehended without attention to empire, extraction, colonialism, and the rise of what Immanuel Wallerstein has called the world system. This world system was possible because of built environments that enabled resource extraction, transport of raw materials, circulation of commodities, and enactment of power relations in the struggle between capital and labor. Separated into three sections: Harvesting the Environment, Cultivating Profit, and Circulating Commodities: Networks and Infrastructures, this volume covers a wide range of geographies, from England to South America, from Africa to South Carolina. The book aims to decenter Eurocentric approaches to architectural history to expose the global circulation of ideas, things, commodities, and people that constituted the architecture of extraction in the Atlantic World. In focusing on extraction, we aim to recover histories of labor exploitation and racialized oppression of interest to the global community. The book will be of interest to researchers and students of architectural history, geography, urban and labor history, literary studies, historic preservation, and colonial studies.

For architecture and urban space to have relevance in the 21st Century, we cannot merely reignite the approaches of thought and design that were operative in the last century. This is despite, or because of, the nexus between politics and space often being theorized as a representation or by-product of politics. As a symbol or an effect, the spatial dimension is depoliticized. Consequently, architecture and the urban are halted from fostering any systematic change as they are secondary to the event and therefore incapable of performing any political role. This handbook explores how architecture and urban space can unsettle the unquestioned construct of the spatial politics of governing. Considering both ongoing and unprecedented global problems – from violence and urban warfare, the refugee crisis, borderization, detention camps, terrorist attacks to capitalist urbanization, inequity, social unrest and climate change – this handbook provides a comprehensive and multidisciplinary research focused on the complex nexus of politics, architecture and urban space. Volume I starts by pointing out the need to explore the politics of spatialization to make sense of the operational nature of spatial oppression in contemporary times. The operative and active political reading of space is disseminated through five thematics: Violence and War Machines; Security and Borders; Race, Identity and Ideology; Spectacle and the Screen; and Mapping Landscapes and Big Data. This first volume of the handbook frames cutting-edge contemporary debates and presents studies of actual theories and projects that address spatial politics. This Handbook will be of interest to anyone seeking to meaningfully disrupt the reduction of space to an oppressive or neutral backdrop of political realities.