“Global cities and the spread of infectious disease: the case of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in Toronto, Canada”

Abstract

This chapter examines how the nature of the threat of infectious disease outbreaks has changed through the alteration of patterns in microbial traffic, vis-a-vis the global city network. Toronto articulates the Canadian economy with the global economy. The regional economy of Canada’s global city – largely based on high value added automotive manufacturing, finance, culture production, business services, education, health care, and biomedical industries – is an important piece of a continentalizing and globalizing Canada. Debates on urbanization and globalization have, perhaps, most systematically been linked in a growing body of conceptual and empirical work which deals with the emergence of a network of world cities or global cities. Global cities may be organized in a hierarchical fashion or in “cliques,” in which certain distinct clusters or strata of cities are ordered according to the economic, political, and cultural power they yield on the international scene.