ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the relationship between global urbanism and public health, providing a schematic overview of some key urban theoretical approaches to health in global cities. It sketches the rise of the bioeconomy, the creation of a global medical economy based around pharmaceuticals and medical service expertise. The chapter focuses on the work such as Aihwa Ong’s Fungible Life to consider how the globalisation of health research and development, particularly around genetics, has a spatial logic in the active sites of knowledge production. It then sketches a moral urban economy around such innovation milieu and the relationships between venture capital and new health products. The other side of the global urban economy is the field of health innovation, which is strongly associated with biomedical and bioengineering venture capital investment. This sub-sector of the economy offers potentially lucrative returns to investors through patented drug discovery, covering a wide range of medicines and diagnostic intervention infrastructure, such as scanners and blood tests.
