ABSTRACT
The global COVID pandemic has evidenced how essential territories are in general, and mobility in particular, dealing with the current crisis. In Chile, we have observed how multiple scales and diverse territorial relations and dimensions have had a crucial role in the spread of the virus. Current mobilities, or, more precisely, the ban on movement, unveiled the multiple inequalities faced by urban dwellers;while some were able to stay at home and manage distance working, many others had to continue moving around. The latter also live in conditions that make it impossible for them to do so, either because of their income-generating activities, overcrowded living conditions or remote distances to reach infrastructures and services, among others. Amid these conditions, many of the difficulties faced during months of confinement relate with unavoidable caring responsibilities. In the Chilean context of inadequate protection provided by authorities, urban dwellers had to undertake caring responsibilities both at the individual and community levels as weeks and months went by. Under lockdown, work and health issues became intertwined with domestic chores including caring activities of relatives, friends, and neighbours. The measures taken by government authorities were insufficient to actually take care of citizens, and generated an increase in illness numbers, hunger, decrease in income, and overall malaise, which led to the emergence of neighbourhood and community support groups to take care of the uncared-for population. This chapter tries to document how these care actions emerge as a possibility for rethinking our cities for the future and discusses how we can transit from cities focused on efficiency and productivity to cities that take care of its reproduction. Recognising territories as relational and valuing the multiple knowledges present in these relations highlights the importance of care not just as private matters to be solved individually, generally by women, but instead, as a collective concern linked by mobility practices. © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Maria Alice de Faria Nogueira;individual chapters, the contributors.
ABSTRACT
The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) epidemic is an unprecedented global health crisis and the effects may be related to environmental and socio-economic factors. In São Paulo, Brazil, the first death occurred in March 2020 and since then the numbers have grown to 175 new deaths per day in April 2021, positioning the city as the epicenter of the number of cases and deaths in Brazil. São Paulo is one of the largest cities in the world with more than 12 million inhabitants, a fleet of about 8 million vehicles and frequent pollutant concentrations above recommended values. Social inequalities are evident in the municipality, similarly to other cities in the world. This paper focuses on transportation activities related to air pollution and associated with cardiovascular and respiratory diseases especially on people who developed comorbidities during their whole life. This study relates travel trip data to air quality analysis and expanded to COVID-19 disease. This work studied the relationship of deaths in São Paulo due to COVID-19 with demographic density, with family income, with the use of public transport and with atmospheric pollution for the period between March 17th, 2020 and April 29th, 2021. The main results showed that generally passenger kilometers traveled, commuting times and air quality related diseases increase with residential distance from the city center, and thus, with decreasing residential density. PM2.5 concentrations are positively correlated with COVID-19 deaths, regions with high urban densities have higher numbers of deaths and long-distance frequent trips can contribute to spread of the disease.
ABSTRACT
This paper presents an analysis of the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the air quality of the Metropolitan Region of São Paulo (MRSP). The effects of social distancing are still recent in the society;however, it was possible to observe patterns of environmental changes in places that had adhered transportation measures to combat the spread of the coronavirus. Thus, from the analysis of the traffic volumes made on some of the main access highways to the MRSP, as well as the monitoring of the levels of fine particulate matter (PM2.5), carbon monoxide (CO) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2), directly linked to atmospheric emissions from motor vehicles–which make up about 95% of air polluting agents in the region in different locations–we showed relationships between the improvement in air quality and the decrease in vehicles that access the MRSP. To improve the data analysis, therefore, the isolation index parameter was evaluated to provide daily information on the percentage of citizens in each municipality of the state that was effectively practicing social distancing. The intersection of these groups of data determined that the COVID-19 pandemic reduced the volume of vehicles on the highways by up to 50% of what it was in 2019, with the subsequent recovery of the traffic volume, even surpassing the values from the baseline year. Thus, the isolation index showed a decline of up to 20% between its implementation in March 2020 and December 2020. These data and the way they varied during 2020 allowed to observe an improvement of up to 50% in analyzed periods of the pollutants PM2.5, CO and NO2 in the MRSP. The main contribution of this study, alongside the synergistic use of data from different sources, was to perform traffic flow analysis separately for light and heavy duty vehicles (LDVs and HDVs). The relationships between traffic volume patterns and COVID-19 pollution were analyzed based on time series. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.