This book presents several perspectives on the COVID-19 crisis as it impacted the United States, focusing on policies, practices, and patterns. It considers the relationship between government policies and neo-liberalism, (anti)federalism, economies of scale, and material culture. The COVID-19 crisis became the primary current event in the United States in March 2020 and continued for several years. In the early days of the crisis, the United States lacked a cohesive, comprehensive approach to combating its spread. As a result, the pandemic was experienced differently in different parts of the United States and at different scales. The chapters in this volume include both quantitative and qualitative explorations of the pandemic as it occurred in the United States. Collectively, they help the reader to better understand this geographically salient issue and provide lessons to learn from so as to improve upon responses to crises in the future. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of Geography, Sociology, Political Science, and Economics with an interest in United States and the socio-political effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Geographical Review.

This book presents several perspectives on the COVID-19 crisis as it impacted the United States, focusing on policies, practices, and patterns. It considers the relationship between government policies and neo-liberalism, (anti)federalism, economies of scale, and material culture. The COVID-19 crisis became the primary current event in the United States in March 2020 and continued for several years. In the early days of the crisis, the United States lacked a cohesive, comprehensive approach to combating its spread. As a result, the pandemic was experienced differently in different parts of the United States and at different scales. The chapters in this volume include both quantitative and qualitative explorations of the pandemic as it occurred in the United States. Collectively, they help the reader to better understand this geographically salient issue and provide lessons to learn from so as to improve upon responses to crises in the future. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of Geography, Sociology, Political Science, and Economics with an interest in United States and the socio-political effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Geographical Review.

This volume provides a critical response to the COVID-19 pandemic showcasing the full range of issues and perspectives that the discipline of geography can expose and bring to the table, not only to this specific event, but to others like it that might occur in future. Comprised of almost 60 short (2500 word) easy to read chapters, the collection provides numerous theoretical, empirical and methodological entry points to understanding the ways in which space, place and other geographical phenomenon are implicated in the crisis. Although falling under a health geography book series, the book explores the centrality and importance of a full range of biological, material, social, cultural, economic, urban, rural and other geographies. Hence the book bridges fields of study and sub-disciplines that are often regarded as separate worlds, demonstrating the potential for future collaboration and cross-disciplinary inquiry. Indeed book articulates a diverse but ultimately fulsome and multiscalar geographical approach to the major health challenge of our time, bringing different types of scholarship together with common purpose. The intended audience ranges from senior undergraduate students and graduate students to professional academics in geography and a host of related disciplines. These scholars might be interested in COVID-19 specifically or in the book’s broad disciplinary approach to infectious disease more generally. The book will also be helpful to policy-makers at various levels in formulating responses, and to general readers interested in learning about the COVID-19 crisis.

We are witnessing an unprecedented global outbreak of COVID-19, which has been devastating in its consequences. Beyond the acute health hazard, the pandemic has carried with it other threats for mankind associated with the human economy, society, culture, psychology and politics. Amidst these multifarious dimensions of the pandemic, it is high time for global solidarity to save humankind.Human society, its ambient environment, the process of socio-economic development, and politics and power – all are drivers to establish the world order. All these parameters are intimately and integrally related. The interconnections of these three driving forces have a significant bearing on life, space and time. In parallel, the interrelationship between all these drivers is dynamic, and they are changed drastically with time and space. The statistics serve to align the thought, based on which social scientists need to understand the prevailing equation to project the unforeseen future. The trajectory of the future world helps in planning and policymaking with a scientific direction.The practitioners of all academic disciplines under the umbrella of the social sciences need a common platform to exchange ideas that may be effective in the sustainable management of the crisis and the way forward after it is mitigated. This book provides multidisciplinary contributions for expressing the solidarity of academic knowledge to fight against this global challenge. It is crucial that there should be an on-going discussion and exchange of ideas, not only from the perspective of the current times but keeping in view the preparedness for unforeseen post-COVID crises as well.

The book provides a global perspective of local government response towards the COVID-19 pandemic through the analysis of a sample of countries in all continents. It examines the responses of local government, as well as the responses local government developed in articulation with other tiers of government and with civil society organizations, and explores the social, economic and policy impacts of the pandemic. The book offers an innovative contribution on the role of local government during the pandemic and discusses lessons for the future. The COVID-19 pandemic had a global impact on public health, in the well-being of citizens, in the economy, on civic life, in the provision of public services, and in the governance of cities and other human settlements, although in an uneven form across countries, cities and local communities. Cities and local governments have been acting decisively to apply the policy measures defined at national level to the specific local conditions. COVID-19 has exposed the inadequacy of the crisis response infrastructures and policies at both national and local levels in these countries as well as in many others across the world. But it also exposed much broader and deeper weaknesses that result from how societies are organized, namely the insecure life a substantial proportion of citizens have, as a result of economic and social policies followed in previous decades, which accentuated the impacts of the lockdown measures on employment, income, housing, among a myriad of other social dimensions. Besides the analysis of how governments, and local government, responded to the public health issues raised by the spread of the virus, the book deals also with the diversity of responses local governments have adopted and implemented in the countries, regions, cities and metropolitan areas. The analysis of these policy responses indicates that previously unthinkable policies can surprisingly be implemented at both national and local levels.

This book examines how COVID-19 has often enhanced social and economic marginalisation in different places and societies around the world. It explores the reality that selective deglobalisation is occurring and over and above the human tragedy which has been experienced, many societies and economies have had to adapt to the new reality which they find themselves in. Governments have been challenged to improve health care and provide economic relief and stimulus packages to sectors as diverse as tourism and education which have had to develop new ways of coping. Resilience theory is drawn on to help explain some of the creative responses which we observe, while in other places deep-rooted concerns for the future are a stark reality. By describing how the pandemic has exacerbated pre-existing geographic, social and economic marginalisation, particularly for the most vulnerable places, societies and economic activities globally, this book provides insight into the impacts and implications across the world and reflects on the different experiences.

Geographic information systems represent an exciting and rapidly expanding technology via which spatial data may be captured, stored, retrieved, displayed, manipulated and analysed. Applications of this technology include detailed inventories of land use parcels. Spatial patterns of disease, geodemographics, environmental management and macroscale inventories of global resources. The impetus for this book is the relative lack of research into the integration of spatial analysis and GIS, and the potential benefits in developing such an integration. From a GIS perspective, there is an increasing demand for systems that do something other than display and organize data. From a spatial analytical perspective, there are advantages to linking statistical methods and mathematical models to the database and display capabilities of a GIS. Although the GIS may not be absolutely necessary for spatial analysis, it can facilitate such an analysis and moreover provide insights that might otherwise have been missed. The contributions to the book tell us where we are and where we ought to be going. It suggests that the integration of spatial analysis and GIS will stimulate interest in quantitative spatial science, particularly exploratory and visual types of analysis and represents a unique statement of the state-of-the-art issues in integration and interface.