Ebola is the most recent form of one of civilization’s deepest fears. From Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year and Poe’s Masque of the Red Death, through recent films like Outbreak, 28 Days Later, and Contagion, uncontainable pestilence has consistently gripped people’s imagination, if not always their rationality. The most obvious downside of urban density was once infectious disease. Better public-health infrastructure (chiefly safe water, ventilation, and street and residential sanitation, plus better medical management of microorganisms) was a precondition for what Richard Florida and other urbanists call “the Great Reset”: America’s rediscovery of the many cultural, economic, environmental, and energy advantages of city life. Because urban conditions no longer include rampant tuberculosis, cholera, and the other scourges of the pre-antibiotic era, contemporary New Yorkers can enjoy the benefits of proximity and diversity. Nothing would spoil that particular party like a new and even deadlier plague. Continue reading “Designing to Outsmart Ebola: Time to Think about the Unthinkable”