Speculation about the coming pandemic, some form of infectious disease, most likely a respiratory illness that will reach epidemic proportions, has become part of the global vernacular. While there is much focus in this global public debate on the readiness of national healthcare systems to deal with the expected fallout of the new "plague," not much specific work has been published on the urban aspects of emerging infectious diseases, particularly in the increasingly significant context of

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... alizing cities and the global cities network. This book will begin to address this gap in the current literature by focusing on certain relevant and broad questions that will serve as springboards for discussion. First, we use the empirical case of SARS to investigate in what ways processes of globalization have affected the transmission and response to this disease within and between global cities such as Toronto, Hong Kong, and Singapore. SARS represents one of the most recent examples of how a new and emerging disease can spread under contemporary conditions of globalization, and the consideration of this case, as we shall see, offers considerable insight into the practical issues related to global cities and disease. Second, we seek to situate the issues raised by the first question into a more appropriate theoretical context; that is, we wish to move toward the development of a conceptual framework that is better suited to study the myriad issues involving the very complex relationship between urban settings and infectious disease. It is our contention that such a framework would