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The New Urban Normal
Pitches Julio D’Avila, DPU, the Bartlett FOCUS of the talk: Questioning the assumed link between rapid urbanization and the emergence of zoonotic diseases and enriching this debate by including the effects of structural drivers such as poverty and inequality and their spatial embeddedness. Julio starts with explaining the context of the findings he is going to present. They come out of a five year project led by Professor Eric Fèvre and Professor Mark Woolhouse, who has been in the news quite a lot in the UK as a result of the COVID19 pandemic. The project is funded by a consortium of UK research agencies, including the Medical Research Council. More information about the project can be found on http:// www.zoonotic-diseases.org/project/urban-zoo-project/ About eight years ago the team decided to investigate a number of emerging diseases little was known about. Diseases like Ebola or SARS move from animal hosts to infect humans. We tried to find out how they emerge, reproduce themselves and settle in human populations in cities. It’s a hugely complex process. The team scanned the literature for the last 20 or 30 years, looking at a number of key words from epidemiology, from urban planning, from urban agriculture and so on, and came up with quite a large, vast set of publications. Most of them came from biology, medical sciences or vet sciences, more so than urban planning. What they were looking at was the background to zoonotic diseases on how do they would evolve in parallel with urbanization, particularly with fast urbanization in developing countries. Zoonotic diseases are transmitted between vertebrate animals
KEY TAKE AWAYS Drivers that effect the zoonosis: Poverty and relative disadvantage, movement of people and animals, land-use change and urban and agriculture policies.
