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2 December 2020updated 03 Dec 2020 11:22am

How pandemics shape town planning

Tuberculosis led to the rise of modernist public architecture. What will our cities look like after Covid-19?   

By Ken Worpole

When our local park reopened after the first Covid lockdown, banners attached to the gates announced new rules for park users, including no spitting. Similar prohibitions were common in public spaces when I was young: traces of an earlier pandemic that killed millions. Between 1882, when the tuberculosis (TB) bacillus was first identified, and the end of the Second World War, when the BCG vaccine became widely available, the programme to eradicate the disease was responsible for a revolution in public health policy, but it also gave rise to modern town planning. The relationship between the two has been central to public well-being ever since.

In 1875 Benjamin Ward Richardson, the president of the Social Science Association, outlined a model for a new kind of city, subsequently published as Hygeia: A City of Health. This was the same year as the UK’s path-breaking Public Health Act, which inaugurated a new era of clean water, the safe disposal of sewage, and regulations requiring homes to provide fresh air and natural light in the hope of eradicating TB.

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