The View from the Socio-Spatial Peripheries: Milan, Italy and Toronto, Canada

At first, the virus causing COVID-19 [[this comma is incorrect]] spread from Wuhan in much the same way as its predecessor, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), did in 2003: through the network of global industrial and financial centers that define the structure of the world economy. But the trajectory of COVID-19 turned out to be more complex: the new virus proliferates nearly everywhere, including in urban peripheries that have characterized recent urbanization trends. The environments of COVID-19 transmission in the global urban peripheries coalesce into multifaceted and complex geographies characterized by health care system (in)equality, lack of infrastructures, overcrowding, low-wage labor, racism, vulnerability of age/living in an institution, and so on. While posing a major challenge to public health systems around the world, the pandemic has thrown the contemporary challenges for the responses to outbreaks of emerging infectious diseases into sharper view, especially with reference to the accelerated extension of urban processes and forms into regions that had previously not been urbanized. But eight months into the pandemic, as it has now rolled over most settled regions around the world, places in the global urban world and the spaces between them have generated complex, and often contradictory, outbreak and reopening narratives.