Page 78 - The Economist USA

UPLOADED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws

78 Books & arts The Economist April 25th 2020

How diseases shape cities
Microbes and the metropolis

Plague, cholera and tuberculosis changed architecture and urban planning.
Covid-19 might not

Perspectives is part from the occasional wailing siren, New York cause their air was so bad. He did not mean the coal and
an occasional ACity is eerily quiet—so quiet that you may be wo- wood smoke that hung over them. “The poison which
series in which our ken by birdsong, says Beatriz Colomina, an architec- causes death is not a gas,” he said, “but a sort of atmo-
correspondents tural historian. The city looks different, too. Pedestri- sphere of organic particles, undergoing incessant
put the pandemic ans have taken to the roads, which are almost empty of transformations.” Gavin was reiterating the centuries-
in context moving cars. Those widely spaced walkers can look up old orthodoxy that bad air, or “miasma”, caused a host
and see things that they missed before. For Ms Colo- of diseases. This theory dominated secular thinking
mina, it is an ideal time to appreciate buildings. about disease from the Middle Ages to the second half
New York is an excellent place for that, both in of the 19th century, when it was gradually displaced by
terms of aesthetics and of history. Not only does it con- germ theory. Miasmas explained why cities, with their
tain much fine architecture. It also displays the scars of narrow alleys, fetid streams and stinking piles of ani-
previous contagions, some of them far deadlier than mal waste, were so much sicker than villages.
covid-19. From the tenements of the Lower East Side to If you believe that disease is caused by such mias-
Central Park to the subway system, New York has been mas, you naturally try to purify the air. During out-
shaped by disease and attempts to contain it. breaks of plague, which periodically ravaged European
The “city of living death”, as one commentator cities from the 14th to the 18th centuries, urban offi-
dubbed it in the early 20th century, is not the only one cials cleared the streets of rotting rubbish, lit bonfires
so affected. Some of the other cities hardest hit by co- and even fired guns. Walled cities stopped travellers
vid-19, such as London and Milan, previously battled and burned soft goods that might harbour miasma.
plague, cholera and tuberculosis, and changed as a re- Plague victims were shut in their homes, lest their em-
sult. In all sorts of places architecture has been shaped anations infect others. Their doors were marked with
by disease. Looking at the history of urban contagions crosses, as a protection and a warning.
makes it a little easier to predict how covid-19 will A few tried to do more. By the 15th century the great
change cities. Past experience suggests that the pan- Italian cities were creating “lazzaretti”, or pesthouses,
demic will have only a short-lived impact—briefer to quarantine the sick during epidemics. Milan’s could
than some people now hope. hold 16,000 people, packed into small rooms with
Until about a century ago many cities levied such chimneys to vent noxious emanations. Conditions
a heavy “mortality penalty” on their inhabitants that there were dreadful. In 1629 a public-health official
they would have shrunk had migrants not kept pouring “went into a dead faint for the stinking smells
into them. In 1847 a Scottish doctor, Hector Gavin, that came forth from all those bodies and those little
estimated that Londoners gave up eight years of life rooms”. The complex was demolished in the late 19th
compared with the English average, whereas the century and replaced with homes. But its church
inhabitants of Liverpool lost 19. This was probably an remains, and the outline of the lazzaretto can still be
underestimate, he added. seen in the city’s street plan.
Cities were deadly, Gavin went on to explain, be- Not all cities followed suit. In the 1660s a Parlia- 1