ABSTRACT
Three years after its departure from the global public limelight, SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) remains a key public crisis for referencing the risks that a transborder epidemic can bring to public health managers, governments, corporations, information managers, urban planners, and so on. Despite the continued interest in learning the lessons of SARS, some old habits die hard. If neoliberal globalization came to a screeching halt in the spring of 2003, its imperative to forge multiple levels of economic, cultural, and urban convergences nonetheless pressed on immediately after the material threat of SARS waned. Hong Kong was one of the main epicenters of SARS in the world. Its post-SARS recovery efforts focused almost exclusively on economic revival. While urban hygiene had improved, the general public’s level of knowledge about pulmonary diseases had increased, and the government was more alert than ever to potential disease outbreaks in the community, a “new normal” for the city emerged around an economically driven framework and model. The primacy given to business considerations for a post-SARS city, however, had deemphasized the possibility of any other types of revival plan; the restoration of the economy was taken to drive social, psychological, cultural, and urban recovery. Nor was there a systematic reassessment of how the city would continue to cope with various scales of risk that the transborder convergence with the mainland would bring.
