key: cord-0690216-hg5fg7zv
authors: Spencer, James Nguyen H.
title: Editorial Introduction: A very brief introduction to the landscape of emerging infectious diseases
date: 2021-11-21
journal: Landsc Urban Plan
DOI: 10.1016/j.landurbplan.2021.104312
sha: 1eef97d79f3e9e98c58c01b0657523e43e367298
doc_id: 690216
cord_uid: hg5fg7zv

nan

Recently, Landscape and Urban Planning and several other journals have published work on urbanization and emerging infectious diseases (EIDs). This work has shown that large urban agglomerations of settlement and economic activity can be both the sources of these EIDs, as well as stop-over points that potentially turn periodic regional epidemics into global pandemics. Urban regions are the nodes through which these pathogens cross national boundaries, and a larger teleconnected global network of cities is the larger system through which they threaten public health. Importantly, the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) also describes that these infectious disease outbreaks take hold in the world's most vulnerable areascountries with few resources needed to stem the tide of infection locally before it becomes a global threat.

As epidemics that have become pandemics, COVID-19 and other kinds of EIDs are the result of humans living, working, playing, and being in denser physical landscapes. The practice of physical distancing to increase personal space is an example of recognizing this underlying fact that, at root, a pandemic is a geographic problem that may extend to the landscape scale. It is for this reason that microbiologists, those who track and contain the viruses at the individual body level have come to see the very important role of urbanization in the growth of EIDs. While these facts are not in dispute, urban and landscape planners have not had much to say about the evolution of EIDs, nor the variety of ways that they can be contained. Thus, this special issue of Landscape and Urban Planning stands to be the first scientific journal special issue to focus on the planning and policy aspects of a the growing global challenge of EIDs.

Today, with rapid urbanization of large parts of the developing world, especially the peri-urban regions of Asia and Africa, risk conditions for the development of new pathogens such as Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, Ebola, Swine Flu, and now COVID-19, combined with well documented 20th Century pandemics such as Influenza and HIV/ AIDS, illustrate the extent to which the relationship between landscape planning and EIDs needs attention from the research community.

While the US National Academy of Medicine has pointed to some success from building platforms for improved virtual surveillance at the global scale, it is clear that traditional medically-based approaches must combine with new, non-medical tools to both prevent and mitigate the EID threat. (e.g. Kilpatrick & Randolph, 2016; Rubin et al., 2013) . Moreover, the COVID-19 crisis is the tip of a deep iceberg of potential EIDs worthy of significant attention from applied scholarship that should include landscape planners and other social scientists. The basic premise of this special issue is that these current trends in the literature argue forcefully that both the human health and economic impacts of EIDs are landscape-level issues.

The collection of seven articles compiled here is not only the first to examine, with both conceptual and empirical arguments, the key role that planners and designers might play in mitigating and responding to global pandemics. It may also be one of the first to conceptualize the biotic, built, and social planning and design drivers of a number of diseases often in popular headlines, but rarely theorized outside of a narrow medical or public health framework. The articles here address EIDs from COVID-19, to Ebola, HIV/AIDS, Pandemic Influenza, and Re-Emerging Dengue Fever. Combined with research published in Landscape and Urban Planning on narrowly-averted pandemic threats such as Avian Influenza (Spencer et al., 2020) , this special issue should help planners and designers consider how they might more effectively contribute to global public health.

In my Perspective Essay, I provide an overview of what EIDs are and how they arise as zoonotic infections crossing species boundaries in areas where animals and humans exist in close proximity. I then illustrate how this has happened historically, enabled by rapid and unplanned interactions between dense human and animal populations combined with relatively unregulated global connectivity of human populations. This process can happen seemingly overnight in its sweeping universally through vast numbers of people, as was the case of Pandemic Influenza in 1918, or it can gradually become known due to a lack of focus on the challenges facing marginalized communities, as has been the case with HIV/AIDS. In summarizing the histories of these two pandemics, I argue that it is the same process leading to each, and I propose a conceptual framework linking landscape patches and a global E-mail address: jhs@lsu.edu. In a Research Note, Matthew, Orbinski, Chiota, and Talukder assert the connections between the global phenomenon of climate change, unplanned periurbanization, and the presence of new "switchpoints" at which microbes have more opportunity to move into dense human populations. Based on focus groups in Malawi, Matthew et.al. outline a network of concepts through which EIDs are likely to develop amidst a range of complex and rapid changes in periurban spaces. They make the case that better landscape protection from development can help to mitigate EID global health risk.

Examining West Africa, Ali, Fallah, McCarthy, Keil, and Connolly demonstrate how specific social and physical environments have created conditions under which the EID Ebola Virus has spread much more widely than ever before, even though the disease has been around since the 1950s. Their focus groups and interviews in Liberia and Sierra Leone suggest that distrust of government in urban informal settlements resulted in more severe outbreaks. This finding is complemented nicely by Finucane, Dubowitz, Ghosh-Dastidar, Parker, and Collins' similar work in the American city of Pittsburgh. Their examination of the COVID-19 EID in disinvested, urban African American neighborhoods similarly showed how communities with historical distrust in government may fare differentially during pandemics. Examining the impact of closure policies and practices on neighborhood resident perceptions of risk, illness outcomes, and stress levels, the authors found that closure policies and illnesses resulted in significant psychological distress, but that this stress was mitigated by levels of neighborhood walkability. Beyond these empirical findings, Finucane et al., like Ali et al., illustrate how highly localized aspects of how EIDs affect marginalized neighborhoods differently from others, requiring public health interventions that incorporate planning and design solutions driven by community input. Taken together, these two papers emphasize that distrust in local, national, and international government agencies is a critical aspect of EIDs that warrants greater attention. In the cases of both COVID-19 and Ebola Virus, elevated background levels of distrust of government were exponentially increased because so little was initially known of the respective diseases. Each of these articles illustrates the paramount importance of mitigating distrust when health interventions for EIDs are considered.

Establishing the role of urban planning in the realm of re-emerging infectious diseases, Magalhaes-Cuna, Ju, Morais, Dronova, Ribeiro, Bruhn, Lima, Sales, Schultes, Rodriguez, and Caiaffa empirically illustrate the importance of a particular land-use planning tool in managing the threat of EIDs. They describe how urban green space has been important in controlling contemporary dengue epidemics that have newly arisen in urban environments after having been previously controlled in more rural settings. By examining how local urban biotic environments interact with social vulnerability in Brazil, Magalaes et al. provide an example of how empirical research at the intersection of land use planning, design and management with individual human health outcomes suggests new roles and objectives for planners and urban designers. This form of landscape planning complements traditional medical and public health preventive interventions.

Moore, Hill, Gussy, Siriwardena, Tanser, Spaight, Law, and Thomas also illustrate an example of how landscape analysis can suggest interventions to control EIDs; more specifically based on the geography of emergency medical calls. By analyzing clusters of suspected COVID-19 cases in the East Midlands of the UK, they argue that the dynamics of population vulnerability to the pandemic varies by the physical landscapes and socio-economic conditions of the larger geographies in which they fall. Moreover, their analysis uses real-time data collected midpandemic on ambulance calls that, while not scientifically generated, can suggest alternatives for policy development as a pandemic becomes evident in clusters.

Stepping back from the details of how individual communities have responded to and mitigated emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases by better managing physical and socio-economic landscapes, Moore, Hill, Siriawardena, Tanser, and Spaight offer some general suggestions for future landscape research. In their Perspective Essay, they argue that scholars should challenge traditional assumptions about the types of built environments that promote public health. Their reflections consolidate much of what the other articles in this special issue indicate empirically: that as the world becomes more exposed to new pathogens and emerging infectious diseases, scholarship on the role of landscapes needs to be updated to provide plans and designs that mitigate and prevent, rather than unintentionally exacerbate disease prevalence.

I hope that this Special Issue shows that as the world adjusts to the recent history of the COVID-19 pandemic, scholarly communities should consider how their work might assist in identifying, preventing, and mitigating the worst effects of zoonotic disease transmission. The EIDs and their differential affects that result from these landscape processes are likely to be increasingly prevalent as regions develop rapidly, and connect more directly across greater distances. This Special Issue offers an initial entryway for landscape scholars to frame solutions-oriented research that will advance planning and design approaches to counter the threat of this category of disease about which so little is known.

Drivers, Dynamics, And Control Of Emerging Vector-Borne Zoonotic Diseases. Global Health Impacts of Vector-Borne Diseases: Workshop Summary

Review of Institute of Medicine and National Research Council Recommendations for One Health Initiative

Emerging Infectious Disease, the Built Landscape, and Urban Planning: Evidence on Avian Influenza in Viet Nam