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.