Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
again in 1993. More sombre, but for my purposes more pertinent, was the
highly contagious outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS)
that immobilized the city for several months in 2003 and brought it unwel-
come global attention (Ali and Keil 2006, 2007; Duffin and Sweetman
2006). Transmitted by a Toronto victim who returned from a visit to Hong
Kong in February that year, SARS caused 44 deaths and between 375 and
438 infections over the next several months (Naylor 2003). Estimated losses
to the city of close to $1 billion ensued, principally from impeded travel.
Like never before, Toronto became captive to global scrutiny, subject to tra-
vel advisories and effective quarantine from the World Health Organization,
and stigmatized as the North American epicentre of the disease in widely
disseminated media and global internet maps. It took a sensational event
supplying an equivalently loud world signal, a vast benefit concert at the
end of July headlined by global masters of spin, the Rolling Stones, to
declare the all clear and bring back Toronto from its pariah status into the
network of hyperlinked world cities.
A medical doctor introduced SARS, a virulently infectious disease,
to the Metropole Hotel in Hong Kong on a family visit from nearby
Guangdong Province in February 2003 (Leung et al. 2004). Highly con-
tagious, the disease was transmitted to 12 other hotel residents who acted
as carriers during the next few days in travel to Vietnam, Singapore,
Ireland, Germany and Canada. The returnee to Toronto, an elderly woman,
became ill and died just over a week later. By then family members were
contaminated and the infection circulated among patients and health care
staff, many of them immigrants, at Scarborough's Grace Hospital in sub-
urban Toronto. An infected cluster formed around a diasporic Filipino
religious community in Toronto; earlier a nurse's aid carried the virus in a
family visit to the Philippines. A second outbreak erupted at North York
General Hospital, as Toronto's north and northeastern suburbs, home to
Canadians originating in East and Southeast Asia, formed the regional
epicentre of the disease.
The SARS outbreak highlighted several important themes in the redefini-
tion of time and place in the global city. The first is the expansion of expe-
rienced space for many to a unified social field that transcends national
political borders. Guangdong, Hong Kong and Toronto became effectively
next-door neighbours, with medical professionals anxiously seeking the
interactions among the three places that shaped the incidence of SARS
infections. Cross-border routes joining scattered hubs, as well as sedentary
place-based roots, define the social geography of the world city (Clifford
1992, 1997). So the fixed and sometimes segregated maps of urban ethnic
groups are only the first approximation of life-worlds equally characterized
by movement and discontinuity, by loyalties and materialities commonly
in flux, by identities lived there as well as here. A transnational household
