{"id":62186,"date":"2020-06-22T09:00:35","date_gmt":"2020-06-22T13:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/?p=62186"},"modified":"2020-06-22T09:32:29","modified_gmt":"2020-06-22T13:32:29","slug":"lorinc-the-pandemic-is-about-cities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2020\/06\/22\/lorinc-the-pandemic-is-about-cities\/","title":{"rendered":"LORINC: The pandemic is about cities"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Viruses, in the abstract, don\u2019t care much about their host organisms, beyond the latter\u2019s on-board, physiological defenses. Yet it\u2019s clear the coronavirus that causes COVID19 has, for a range of increasingly well-documented reasons, afflicted the elderly and the residents of low-income, predominantly non-white neighbourhoods at far higher rates than other parts of the population.<\/p>\n

Beyond those emerging demographic realities, there\u2019s one more: as the Canadian Urban Institute (CUI) discusses in a first-100 days report released this past Friday, the footprint of the pandemic skews disproportionately<\/em> urban.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe largest 20 cities in Canada account for 42 percent of the country\u2019s population and yet over the first 100 days of COVID account for 67 per cent of total cases, and 75 per cent of total deaths,\u201d according to the CUI<\/a>. \u201cSome cities have fared much worse than others: Montreal, for example, has had more than 25 times the number of per capita cases as Edmonton.\u201d<\/p>\n

One might say there\u2019s a what\u2019s-new-under-the-sun quality to this finding. Infectious disease outbreaks through history have been more deadly in urban settings than in the countryside. Cities, in turn, have a long track record of driving innovation in confronting epidemics. Advances in fields like water treatment<\/a>, infection control<\/a>, sanitary sewage infrastructure<\/a> and even the data science that underpins epidemiology<\/a> emerged from cities gripped by the fear of contagion.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s possible that bluetooth-based contact-tracing apps, such as the one the Canadian government finally unveiled last week<\/a> (we\u2019re way behind<\/a> on these), will represent COVID\u2019s technological contribution to humanity\u2019s long-running battle against infectious diseases.<\/p>\n

Yet as we\u2019re thinking about milestones \u2013 100 days, 1,000 deaths<\/a> \u2014 we must also ask what the policy\/institutional legacies are or will be, and whether these will emerge from the cities that evidently require them the most.<\/p>\n

As the introduction to the CUI\u2019s report asks, \u201cThe big questions for 2020 are, what will be the legacy of COVID? How is COVID impacting our communities and our cities, and how can we shape what the future impact will be? What will be reported about COVID in the history books of the future?\u201d<\/p>\n

One possible answer is: they\u2019re already there. Canada\u2019s numbers are tracking down, even as the economy re-opens and people get out more. Except for the conspicuously horrid example of long-term care facilities, we didn\u2019t have giant spikes, deadly partisan conflicts over containment measures or crippling shortages of medical resources. Yes, there was suffering. But it could have been worse.<\/p>\n

What the CUI\u2019s study does, however, is layer on more new evidence to the emerging picture of a pandemic that struck urban communities in markedly different ways. Using a range information from surveys, existings sources and feedback collected from three months of its own data gathering from cities across Canada, the CUI\u2019s study reveals a far more textured picture \u2013 relating to gender, race, class, housing tenure, etc. — than the high-level figures indicate.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur experiences with COVID have depended largely on who we are, and where we live,\u201d the report concludes. \u201cCOVID is deepening existing inequities in Canada\u2019s cities. It is also a moment that calls on us to consider new models of making decisions, empowering local leaders, and supporting people in our cities.\u201d<\/p>\n

In many ways, and this shouldn\u2019t come as a surprise to anyone, the pandemic tracked the disparities that University of Toronto sociologist David Hulchanski has been documenting for years in his \u201cthree cities<\/a>\u201d studies on Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. They reveal that the neighbourhoods in Canada\u2019s largest cities are increasingly sorted by class, race, income and housing tenure, and that geographical polarization has become worse over several decades. Now we can add one more overlay to Hulchanski\u2019s maps, which is sorting by social susceptibility to infection.<\/p>\n

Hulchanski\u2019s research underscores one of the central paradoxes of 21st century cities, which is that they can be both highly successful and deeply troubled at the same time. Innovation, economic growth, and cultural vibrancy can easily co-exist with \u2013 and sometime prey upon — social exclusion and extreme labour disparities.<\/p>\n

The pandemic\u2019s socio-economic footprint merely adds more fodder to Hulchanski\u2019s observations and therefore reinforces the urban policy challenges he\u2019s posed for many years: How do we create meaningful connections across race and class? How do we build a housing system that\u2019s not overtly predatory? How do we foster communities that don\u2019t trend towards monocultures?<\/p>\n

The answers to these questions, it would seem, will also be the answers to some of the deep questions posed by this pandemic.<\/p>\n

Whether the solutions will be municipal is by no means clear. The pandemic has again revealed the fiscal vulnerability of Canada\u2019s municipalities, reliant as they are on inelastic revenues, the vagaries of the real estate market and constitutional restrictions on their ability to act defensively.<\/p>\n

The financial catastrophe facing transit agencies is perhaps the <\/em>gravest immediate symptom of the shut-down, and there\u2019s scant evidence that the other orders of government are prepared to do much to assist.<\/p>\n

The pandemic should also serve as a harsh reminder to all of us that three decades of sustained underfunding of affordable housing was a broadly tolerated neo-liberal policy choice that benefited developers, speculators and middle-class homeowners, and cost many lives during the past few months.<\/p>\n

With plans to revisit this assessment every 100 days until the pandemic ends, the CUI is effectively throwing down the gauntlet to policy-makers. The three orders of government, now seized by the unfathomable risks posed by infectious disease outbreaks, would do well to zero in on the urban implications and begin a real debate about what needs to change in order to fortify all those neighbourhoods whose residents have been drawing the short end of the stick for far too long.<\/p>\n

photo by Francis Mariani<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Viruses, in the abstract, don\u2019t care much about their host organisms, beyond the latter\u2019s on-board, physiological defenses. Yet it\u2019s clear the coronavirus that causes COVID19 has, for a range of increasingly well-documented reasons, afflicted the elderly and the residents of low-income, predominantly non-white neighbourhoods at far higher rates than other parts of the population. BeyondContinue reading “LORINC: The pandemic is about cities”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4051,"featured_media":62192,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[22369,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-62186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pandemic","category-politics"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nLORINC: The pandemic is about cities - Spacing Toronto<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2020\/06\/22\/lorinc-the-pandemic-is-about-cities\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"LORINC: The pandemic is about cities - Spacing Toronto\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Viruses, in the abstract, don\u2019t care much about their host organisms, beyond the latter\u2019s on-board, physiological defenses. 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