Planning for social distancing: How the legacy of historical epidemics shaped COVID-19's spread in Madrid

Abstract

This paper combines historical and contemporary sources to examine ‘epidemic urban planning’ from the first decades of the 20th century through to the present day. It considers how infamous early 20th-century epidemics triggered the development of several urban regulations that profoundly shaped the city’s future. To reduce the risk of contagion in bourgeois space, the city began displacing and spatially segregating the urban poor, leading to deprived neighbourhoods in the city’s suburbs. The social and urban structure of these deprived, ‘vulnerable’ neighbourhoods remains to this day. Madrid was also greatly impacted by the COVID-19 crisis, and the initial distribution of COVID geographies seemed to reflect these historical legacies. Epidemic-influenced segregation kept wealthy neighbourhoods relatively safe during the first waves of the COVID-19 pandemic, concentrating the disease in poorer areas.