global politics and the making of global city regions

At the same time, global health governance overall may be improved by realizing the possibilities that rest in metropolitan governance. Urban governance must be prepared to deal with infectious disease. We rely on the rich and productive output in urban governance studies but will argue that this literature has had a particular blind spot: the relationship of urban governance restructuring to emerging infectious disease (EID). This article looks at the urban governance aspect of these lessons. SARS, a previously unknown disease, is much different from H5N1 but the way it was handled by health authorities around the globe can potentially teach us some lessons about future pandemic preparedness. In many ways, the SARS outbreak is now being read as a stage rehearsal for what many public health experts believe will be a much larger epidemic once the H5N1 virus, which has so far only spread from infected birds to humans, mutates and leads to direct human‐to‐human infection. In the spring of 2003 many parts of the world experienced an outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). This newfound interest in the threat from emerging infectious disease has a recent precedent.

Governments, businesses, and civic organizations at all scales have drawn up preparedness plans. Newspapers and television corporations have discovered the pandemic as a topic of interest. Avian flu has begun to capture the imagination of world publics in recent years as the H5N1 virus spread from its perceived origin in East and Southeast Asia to Turkey and potentially to Western Europe ( Davis 2005).

Global politics and the making of global city regions