Nov 1, 2020
Zoonoses, Urbanity and the Scapegoat
What Stereotypes, Urban Design and Coronavirus have in common
For almost a year now, this tragedy of global proportions has taken many faces. The “Wuhan Virus,” “The Chinese flu,” the “Foreign Virus” are used to reinforce the same behaviors that we so often proscribe. “Never again!” is declared under a shared holocaust-rememberence post or retelling of the Rwhandan genocide. But then again, we so often forget that the greatest harm takes on the form of normality, or even worse — science. In Bulgaira, the Prefect of Timiş, Liliana Oneţ suggested that a spike in illness within a school was not the result of viral spread within the classroom but some “other environment” as there was a child there who “belonged to a Romani family.” The fear associated with this virus has pulled off the veil that at times, blurred the reality of a still predominant “them” vs “us” mindset.
With that being said, the systematic force of cognitive bias creeps up in all forms, sometimes pinning itself to quasi-scientific facts. Take for example the seven hills of republican Rome, where zoning was already taking place based on socioeconomic status. Aventine Hill, an isolated, crescent-shaped district filled with wooden shanty’s and no running water, was a much different neighborhood to the patrician citadels next door.¹ The valleys between these hills were subject to seasonal flooding, which created a severely waterlogged swampy area within the crescent. The geographic isolation from the rest of the six hills burdened the poverty-stricken Romans, who depended on their public square for income and resources. Meats, excrement, human and animal carcasses, and noxious fumes within the public square were common. The stagnant marshland also became a breeding ground for mosquitoes.
As common as this disease was, Romans struggled to find anything beyond a correlation between marshland and the disease. Columella warned of settling near marshes for the reason that there exist “mysterious diseases whose causes are beyond the understanding of physicians.”² Varro was closest in guessing the cause of deadly temperature spikes near marshlands writing, “Care must be taken in marshy areas…because certain small animals breed there. These animals cannot be seen with the naked eye and enter the body through the mouth and nostrils in the air and cause severe disease.” Without solidified knowledge of the disease, “bad air” or “mal aria” was frequently believed to be the major health threat. The Roman Pontine marshes were so malarious that those who cared enough to invade often lost many of their own soldiers. Rome, knowing that only a few poor inhabitants resided there, deemed the marshes a weapon on many occasions. During World War II, Nazi’s re-flooded the Pontine marshes and introduced malaria-carrying mosquito larvae as a bioweapon.
It is then no surprise that people become representatives of the land on which they reside, it is human nature to produce a theatrical format for the stories of our lives. Whether this means grandeur and awe for the littlest things in life or a hefty bias against certain people, the spectrum of our own subjective manipulation of reality is not avoidable — but the most nefarious biases are preventable. The Roman’s who resided on the marshes, were recorded as “the marsh people” in a 494 BC correspondence request for grain and supplies during a famine in Rome caused by a labor slowdown strike. Has anything really changed? Reading a forum for newcomers in my home city, it is common to see questions such as, “Where are the bad places in the city? Where should I avoid?” To which respondents always reply with the names of the most majority-minority neighborhoods.
To any urbanist, it is obvious that these underserved neighborhoods in my city are very tactically developed. When comparing those which have been perfectly planned to accommodate the anticipated influx of large corporations, the majority-minority districts win. Bicycles are a normal form of transportation — no cycling campaign needed, social interdependence allows communities to thrive, and community service organizations are scattered throughout. The yellow victorian townhouses and white-slated colonials mark a different region, of course. To the untrained eye it captures a century-old bias developed by urban renewalists and segregationists. Yet to this new generation of urbanists, we would chuckle. We are trying to get there because successful urbanism is adaptive, people-centered, ecologically friendly, open public space.
Yet we see a trending preference for grandeur all over the world. In this remarkably new era of globalization, countries everywhere are racing to take the spot as world leader. Urban space is the golden swan of multifaceted global success. It attracts tourists, global firms, innovators, celebrities and many more sources of continued prosperity and status. The tectonic plates of global superpower status are shifting to China, this is undeniable. As China’s power grows, so does the government’s demand for greater tracts of urban space. Urban spillover is therefore not the result of an organic population increase but a forced encroachment of peri-urban and farmland space.
China has even catered to this development tactic with apartheid restrictions known as the known as the Huji System. Under the Huji system, families must register in their Hukou, or a domestic passport that regulates access between urban and rural populations. As urban space tracts outward, rural families are severely restricted from gaining any sort of bargaining power. Small peri-urban governments are forced to expropriate farmland to predatory investors. Attempts by agrarian workers to gain access to the urban workforce are often pushed back, further exacerbating the income disparities between the rural and urban populations. During a September 2005 House Hearing conversation surrounding the Hukou system seemed to confirm its negative effects on the Chinese population:
“ On March 17, 2003, a young migrant from Wuhan of Hubei Province named Sun Zhigang was arrested for having no identification papers by the police in Guangzhou, where he was actually lawfully employed and registered. He was in typical manner abused by the police and brutally beaten to death three days later by fellow inmates during the repatriation process.”
The living conditions of the peri-urban and rural Chinese population should then cause no surprise in 2020. As farmland is forcibly removed and access to personal growth stunted by policies, wildlife wet markets become a source of income in areas that do not have the resources to inspect for quality. Let’s refer back to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs; if you are searching for enough income to feed your family and keep your home, the possibility that the animal fluids accumulating on the road may carry a novel disease is not going to be your primary worry. This is not a cultural phenomenon, it is the result of oppression.
Wet markets themselves are a cultural phenomenon. When provided the resources to maintain health, sanitation and inspection they are preferred sources of fresh and sustainable goods. Travel patterns show that Chinese urbanites often frequent wet markets for organic alternatives. This concept is not foreign to Westerners who flock to weekend farmers markets during the summer month. The attraction and sustainability of purchasing straight from the stallholder and farmer is both modern and traditional. In urban China especially supermarkets are both dominating the food market but also struggling to compete. Grocery trends show that Chinese customers prefer to purchase packaged goods rather than produce in the city. Companies like Carrefour SA and Metro AG left local ventures after unsuccessfully attempting to cater to those who still traveled out of the city for produce and fresh meats.
However, as the coronavirus spread, the reactions to wet markets were twofold. China’s government perhaps knew already what racial stereotypes would fall on a whole nation of people. The tactic to control the spread, understate the damage and hide the truth seemed like enough to keep a straight face on the world stage. As countries buckled under the first wave of viral zoonosis, racial prejudice often accompanied outrage. In April Dr. Anthony Fauci the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases expressed his opinions on the wet markets, “It boggles my mind how, when we have so many diseases that emanate out of that unusual human-animal interface, that we just don’t shut it down. I don’t know what else has to happen to get us to appreciate that.” Once again this perpetrates a fallacy that we continue to make — What is the root cause? It is not a cultural element but the perverse mutation of it caused by disjointed policies.
Urban growth in cities around the globe is booming. In 1950, only 30% of the world’s population lived in urban areas. By 2050, urbanites will make up two-thirds of the world’s population. Although urban growth can come in the form of density, it is rapid sprawl into rural areas that forces humans and wildlife to live within uncomfortable boundaries. Wildlife is unavoidable, in fact there is more of it than there is us. If this is true, which most of us will agree in, then why do we continue to build cities that avoid the subject altogether?
Wildlife either adapts by exploiting urban resources, or dies out. Cities that develop without putting people and biodiversity first experience a milieu of secondary issues that are not always visibly linked to poor development. Diabetes, cancer, chronic respiratory and cardiovascular diseases have well-researched ties to urban areas with poor pedestrian infrastructure. What’s more is that the rate of infectious disease has more than tripled in the last 80 years. Two-thirds of those cases are zoonotic diseases — the result of a sprawl spillover effect between humans and wildlife. As global temperatures continue to rise, adaptive hosts like mosquitos will enjoy the benefit of cross-species transmission. The effects of pathogen transmission only become magnified when we look at socio-economic inequalities produced by regressive urban planning.
In the United States, where the majority of “otherized” persons live in urbanized areas, people were quick to mark urbanity as the culprit. Governor Cuomo issued a density-reducing agenda while the New York Times produced an article titled, “Density is New York City’s Biggest Enemy in the Coronavirus Fight.” Sprawling cities declared themselves Covid-19 buffers, with geographers like Joel Kotkin suggesting that sprawl in Los Angeles, although “much-maligned…has proven a major asset.” As denser urban areas adapt, those same localities that used New York as a derogatory term are now seeing frighteningly high peaks themselves. So what’s the deal?
In the 19th century, early urban planners offered a simple solution to cities upheaved by the heavy smog of industrialization — density reduction. By the 20th century, car-centric development was believed to be the perfect solution for transportation around cities that had been forcefully sprawled out. A century later, and the myth still dominates — even when research has shown a near-zero association between the density of 36 global cities and rates of Covid-19 cases and deaths. Poor planning across the world refuses to consider the astonishing synchronism between people and nature. Politics and instability have declared scapegoat populations everywhere, when the answer is simply holistic planning.
We need to rid ourselves of the broken short-termism mindset of “that’s not a priority, we’ll fix it later” because poor decisions have instantaneous effects, even when they aren’t immediately visible. I feel lucky enough to live during a moment when urban development is open to holistic design, one that adjusts itself to accommodate the plurality of this world. If this seems too abstract just know that adaptive urban design is nothing new. When the bubonic plague hit Florence, Italy in the early 17th century, no-contact wine windows were built throughout the city to allow a safe transaction between wine sellers and customers. Today, these historical anomalies are functioning once again as portals to a reviving economy, and cappuccinos.
As occupants of this world, it is time that we worked towards inclusivity, safety, resiliency and sustainability.
[1] “The Republican Aventine and Rome’s Social Order” by Lisa Mignone.
[2] “Columella, On Farming” 1.5
