ABSTRACT
The history of cities as places of epidemic events and urbanization as the generalized framework in which we now have to understand the emergence and spread of contagion includes a trajectory from sparse and isolated settlement to concentrated and extended urbanization that is characteristic of the world in which humans have lived. The growing historical, geographical, social, political and ecological complexity of the relationship of city life and disease requires an equally complex set of strategies when we are trying to understand the relationships of urbanization and disease. The decade preceding the COVID-19 pandemic produced a rich harvest of comparative work in urban and regional studies, which changed the “geographies of theory” and contours of comparative urbanism. Comparative urban research on infectious disease must move from the city to urbanization. The advent of COVID-19 marks a departure from this paradigmatic focus on the global city.
