Of Flying Cars and Pandemic Urbanism: Splintering Urban Society in the Age of Covid-19

ABSTRACT

Disappointingly to many who grew up at the time, promises of flying cars in the 1960s as a future form of urban transportation were not kept. That future never arrived. In this short commentary, I want to board the metaphorical flying car and steer it into a different direction. At the height of the first wave of Covid-19, a more widespread sentiment took hold that saw the anticipation of increased mobilities dashed by a general anticipation of disaster considered typical for our age today. We might conclude: We don't get the technologies we want because we have left the era of technological progress and entered the era of risk and anticipation of disaster. My commentary appreciates and discusses the lessons we can learn from Splintering Urbanism for our period of pandemic urbanism. How does the kind of networked urbanism that the book examines and critiques provide a framework in which we can understand the emergence, presence, and management of the pandemic as it affects our urban world today?

KEYWORDS:

• Splintering urbanism
• emerging infectious disease
• Covid-19
• pandemic urbanism

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Harris Ali and I were delighted to be able to connect to Stephen and Simon as early as April 2004, just as we had received funding to study the SARS outbreak in Toronto, Hong Kong, and Singapore which eventually led to our edited volume Networked Disease (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008) and many other publications on the topic, as well as lately our ongoing research on Ebola and Covid-19. Our work was profoundly influenced by the central concerns of Splintering Urbanism and obtained many crucial insights at the conference “Urban Vulnerability and Network Failure: Construction and Experiences of Emergencies, Crises and Collapse,” which we attended at the University of Salford at the authors’ invitation at the time, and from which we developed better our understanding of relationality, Science and Technology Studies, and Actor Network Theory.

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Notes on contributors

Roger Keil

Roger Keil is a professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, York University in Toronto, Canada. He is the author of Suburban Planet (Polity, 2018) and co-editor, with Fulong Wu, of After Suburbia (UTP, 2022) and (with K. Murat Güney and Murat Üçoğlu) Massive Suburbanization: (Re) Building the Global Periphery (UTP, 2019). Keil's research areas are global suburbanization, cities and infectious disease, regional governance, and urban political ecology.