Cities and pandemics: urban areas are ground zero for the transmission of emerging human infectious diseases

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Abstract
Through the human eye, urbanization has been perceived as a proxy of progress and prosperity. Yet, such perception could be misleading when urbanization processes are primarily driven by socio-economic and political forces, often overlooking the ecological sphere in which they develop. Thus, the resulting cities commonly lack the proper multivariate planning and management strategies required to tackle the complex issues related to such dynamic systems. Examples of the later are ubiquitous across the globe, with some of the largest supercities representing the epitome of unbalanced systems, where social inequality peeks ( United Nations 2015). Although urbanization has improved some aspects of human health due to the presence of health care and sanitary systems—making them less hazardous when contrasted with some wildlands and agricultural systems–, there are many other facets (e.g. social inequality, heterogeneous urban development) that have been overlooked under recurrent reductionist visions ( United Nations 2015; Hassell et al. 2017).
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  • Secretaría de Ciencia, Humanidades, Tecnología e Innovación

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