(토요모임) [17. Mar. 2018] Saturday meeting topic

[Scarlet]

Howdy !  It's me Scarlett !  

This week we have 3 categories of topics which are about cities and urbanization, public health and education skills. Do not be obsessed with all the issues too much. Just pick some articles what you have interests and prepare your opinions related to those articles. :) Detailed lists are as follows. Hope you enjoy the topics.

◈ Urban Gentrification

---- Apartment Redevelopment

---- Gentrification X: how an academic argument became the people's protest

◈ Cities and Urbanization :

---- Paris wants to build a forest 5 times larger than Central Park
---- Why this Danish city is rebuilding itself out of recycled rubble
---- This South Korean city eliminates the need to drive

◈ Education and Skills :

---- 12 ways to get smarter – in one chart

◈ Public Health :

---- Disease X: Unknown Pathogen Could Cause Epidemic That Can Kill Millions Worldwide

---- Beware 'Disease X': the mystery killer keeping scientists awake at night

With luv

Scarlett

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< Apartment Redevelopment >

Talk about apartment redevelopment .

In Korea, apartment buildings that were built long time ago are often redeveloped. The apartments that are subject to redevelopment are usually very old, nearly thirty years old or more. After the government grants approval of redevelopment, the local residents form a group. They select a construction company to carry out the redevelopment. When the new apartments are built, the residents receive distribution rights. Then, the remaining apartments are sold at market price. This is how the construction companies earn a profit. This kind of redevelopment has been happening steadily throughout the country. There are many advantages, such as better living conditions. However, there are also problems such as overheated competition when deciding on a redevelopment company. 

l  Be subject to : 대상이되다.
l  Local[로으끌] resident : 주민이 되다.
l  Group : 조합
l  Grant : 권리를 부여할 때 쓰는 말 gran approval : 승인을 하다
l  Carry out : 시행하다 excute something
l  Distribution right : 분양권
l  At market price : 시장가, 시세
l  Throughout the country : 전국 방방 곳곳
l  Living conditions : 주거 환경

*Be subject to 명사 : 명사의 대상이되다.
Anyone who passes here could be subject to an inspection.
All of the students are subject to pop quizzes.

*local residents : 지역 주민
The local residents are very friendly.
I prefer restaurant that the local residents often go to.

*carry out : 실행하다.
She is the best person to carry out this project.
After the plan was completed, we had to carry out the actual work.

*earn a profit : 수익을 내다.
We weren’t able to earn a profit last year.
To earn a profit, you have to work harder.

*decide on ~ :~을 결정하다.
It always takes a long time to decide on what to eat.
I was late because I couldn’t decide on what to wear.

<Expression‎ of the day>
- Which way should we go?
- I don’t know. I’ve lost my sense of direction. 방향감각을 잃었어.
- Didn’t you grow up in this neighborhood?
- I did, but the apartments have been redeveloped.

I have good/bad sense of direction.

위의 내용의 저작권은 ebs에 있습니다. <2018.Jan.31 입트영>

Topic is offered by Sophie (http://cafe.daum.net/englisholic/NQo9/277)

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Gentrification X: how an academic argument became the people's protest

Dan Hancox/ Tue 12 Jan 2016 07.30 GMT

A protest against the gentrification of Brixton in south London. Photograph: Guy Corbishley/Demotix/Corbis

In the first of a special series on the impact of gentrification on cities around the world, Dan Hancox meets victims and beneficiaries of this highly emotive issue – and finds that the anger is real, and resistance is coming to a head

When Amal had stopped crying, she apologised. “I wake up so sick, you know? I have to go to study but I feel so sick.” A victim of domestic violence and now a single mother, she lives with her three young children in grimy temporary accommodation in Tooting, south London. She was telling me that Wandsworth council, which has a legal obligation to house the family, tried sending them to a rented flat on the outskirts of Newcastle, then suggested West Bromwich. She’d never heard of either place. “I said to them, ‘I already told you, I have a job interview in London, I am studying in London, my children are at school in London, my ex-husband visits every week to help with the children.’”

West Bromwich, the council insisted, was her last chance. Otherwise she would be declared “intentionally homeless”, and be put out with her young children on the street. “They said, ‘just one option: West Bromwich.’ If I said no, they wouldn’t give me another chance.”

This was one London council’s response to the housing crisis – to spend £5m on properties for their poorer families, hundreds of miles away, while across the borough, the Meccano scaffolds rose up for the £15bn development of Nine Elms, where most flats will cost more than £1m.

The same year I met Amal, in 2014, on the other side of London the now notorious Focus E15 Mums were stepping up their campaign to remain in the city where they’d been born. “Nine billion pounds on the Olympics and they’re telling us and our babies we have to go live in Hastings,” lamented 19-year-old Adora Chilaisha during their occupation of East Thames housing association offices, as the hokey cokey played out in the background. “There’s no way I’m going anywhere,” she said. “My boy Desean is one, and I don’t want him to grow up away from his family, from his home. I don’t know anyone in Hastings.”

Two years later, both Amal and Adora and their children are still in London after a long and exhausting struggle against the authorities to simply stay where they are. Meanwhile, those same authorities prostrate themselves before luxury property developers, Chinese business conglomerates and buy-to-let rentiers.

Gentrification is an intensely emotive issue with almost endless potential for argument. That shouldn’t be in the least bit surprising – it speaks to fundamental questions of home, identity and community, how those places define us, and how we define them. The process of displacement of society’s poorest members is, of course, not a new thing. You can trace it back centuries, to a time when there was a literal gentry responsible for social cleansing; when the bailiffs were on horseback and “artisanal” was a descriptor of a pre-industrial social class, rather than vogueish hipster branding.

Nonetheless, there is something of the zeitgeist about gentrification. Until a few years ago, only academic geographers and housing campaigners used the term. In recent years, however, the subject has entered the mainstream, and the word has become increasingly ubiquitous in what seems like almost every city across the world. But it is not only the debate that has intensified: opposition to gentrification is rapidly becoming less marginal, and more organised. While it is easy to locate historical rent strikes and neighbourhood uprisings to what you might call gentrification avant la lettre, for the first time, gentrification itself is a serious point of political contention – and resistance.

The tipping point in the UK came last autumn, when members of Class War’s so-called Fuck Parade, flaming torches in hand, daubed “SCUM” on the windows of east London’s quintessential hipster cafe, Cereal Killer. The restaurant was already castigated by Channel Four News for serving £4 bowls of cereal in a borough in which thousands of poor families can’t afford to feed their children. Although several people, myself included, argued that the bearded cereal entrepreneurs were hardly gentrification’s true villains, the news was reported around the world – not just as a riot that launched a thousand hot takes, but as the expression‎ of a rising tide of anger. The issue had leaped into the mainstream.

Last month, the pre-Christmas episode of This American Life featured an astonishing segment about a San Francisco dad going to see his six-year-old daughter in her school play, and discovering that the entire show was a fierce polemic against the malign influence of tech companies making the city “a sterile playground for the rich”. The play culminates in a huge demonstration outside city hall, with the young children holding placards reading “resistance = love of community” and singing that the city is not for sale.

So why now? The short answer is demand and supply: demand for well-positioned urban space is higher than ever, while the supply of housing options for the urban poor, and the strength and willingness of the state to provide them, is weaker than in decades. In urban policy, we are witnessing the triumph of the market and the capitulation of the state. If an area becomes desirable to those with money – regardless if it was hitherto undesirable or dominated by public housing – then sooner or later, the wealthy will get what they want. “The problem,” said Yolande Barthes from Savills estate agents at a Guardian Live debate last month, “is the area of London that people want to live in hasn’t expanded at the same rate as the population.”

As London’s affordable housing crisis deepens – spurred by the collapse of new social housing construction, and the sale of hundreds of thousands more social flats under right-to-buy – the galvanisation of the British capital’s local communities has been astonishing. This customised Google Map, created by Action East End, drops pins on the map for each hyper-local campaign. From Save Chrisp Street Market in the east to Save Portobello Road Market in the west, the campaigns – many formed only in the last year – range from demands to protect existing social housing, to protests against new luxury flat developments or against the destruction of community assets such as much-loved markets, nurseries, pubs and small businesses. At the time of writing, there are 53 different campaigns.

One is Reclaim Brixton, who formed in March 2015 in opposition to the rapidly accelerating gentrification of the south London area. Co-founder Cyndi Anafo’s mother used to run a Ghanaian grocery in the covered market that has recently been rebranded Brixton Village, a target destination for food tourists and wealthy Londoners. Via social media, Anafo and friends arranged meetings, leading to a carnival-cum-demonstration in Brixton town centre that drew thousands and attracted widespread national media attention. “For about 20 years it’s been on the edge of gentrification,” Anafo says. “But the last five or six years it’s all come to the fore – Reclaim Brixton came about chiefly through frustration.”
While the transformation of Brixton is visible in the proliferation of more expensive shops, bars and restaurants, and the influx of a non-resident, affluent demographic visiting places like Champagne + Fromage, Anafo is clear that the cultural and commercial changes are not the main event. “It all comes down to housing,” she says. “Being a kind of ‘accidental activist’, and getting to know all the existing housing groups, made me realise the severity of the situation on the ground in Brixton, meeting people who are on eviction lists. People moan about particular types of businesses or shops, or estate agents like Foxtons, but my feeling is that rent stabilisation is something that could help everyone.”

Last June, Berlin made headlines when it began enforcing rent controls for all, limiting landlords to charging new tenants more than 10% above the local average. The previous year rents had gone up by more than 9%. “We don’t want a situation like in London or Paris,” said Reiner Wild of the Berlin Tenants’ Association. Such strident legislation to protect poorer citizens does not just drop out of the sky, of course. It emerges from a history of equally robust civic campaigning on housing, gentrification and the right to the city.

Nottingham University geographer Alex Vasudevan, author of a recent book on the subject, Metropolitan Preoccupations, says Berlin is in a sense diametrically different from London – it’s a very poor city, where wages are one-third lower than its western German neighbours. “In the wake of unification Berlin has seen waves of gentrification, while remaining very poor by German standards,” says Vasudevan. “Before the fall of the wall, there were subsidies given to squatters to renovate buildings, and they would be legalised as a result – a kind of compromise. But that programme ended in 2002, and since the wall came down Berlin has become this laboratory of neoliberal urban governance.”

The Tacheles in Berlin was formed in the 1990s as a squat by artists seeking

 to save the building from demolition. It closed in 2012. Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty

As in London, Vasudevan says, funding for social housing collapsed, and simultaneously thousands of what used to be social housing properties were privatised. “Berlin tried to become a financial centre. It failed. So then they went with the whole ‘creative city’ agenda, or at least a version of it, connected with touristification and this kind of ‘Airbnb urbanism’. There’s a great Aibrnb map of Kreuzberg: until recently there was only one property in that neighbourhood that was available on the normal rental market – everything else was Airbnb.”

Grassroots resistance in Berlin has revolved mostly around “very local geographies”, such as saving one particular building, park, housing project, or even fighting the eviction of a much-loved Turkish grocery store. Nonetheless, Vasudevan explains that each victory has galvanised the city as a whole, and made gentrification even more of a common talking point than it is in London. The challenge now has been scaling up, making connections, and sharing information between neighbourhoods, and even internationally.

“They’ve managed to get the rent cap by just being incredibly well-organised, and absolutely dogged – and they are also good at talking to each other. You have local working-class Germans who remained in Kreuzberg, and Turkish migrants collaborating; so everything is written in both German and Turkish, they’re all networked.”

They’re also talking to the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH) in Spain, the grassroots group whose phenomenal success of blocking thousands of evictions propelled its spokeswoman, Ada Colau, to become mayor of Barcelona. Spain’s housing crisis has been so destructive that the PAH’s use of community self-organisation and support, and direct action to block evictions, has been copied across the world. I’ve seen Spanish parents in tears in PAH meetings, being comforted by their foreign-born (often Latin American) neighbours, before rallying to take on the banks trying to evict them. I’ve also seen Sí Se Puede, the PAH documentary, screened to housing activists in London. The international sharing of both tactics and inspiration highlights globalisation’s double-edged sword: property developers and investors may be operating simultaneously in Berlin, London and Barcelona, but the people resisting gentrification in these cities are beginning to network themselves, too.

The gigantic crocheted tribute to Wes Anderson

which appeared at Bushwick Flea Market in Brooklyn. Photograph: London Kaye

What remains to be seen is whether campaigning against gentrification will grow into any city-wide protests. Certainly, the “G” word has been tapped as the new culprit for a lot of urban tensions emerging from the influx of younger, whiter, wealthier people into city cores. After a “yarn-bombing” artist, with the support of the hipster Bushwick Flea market, put up a 15ft crochet homage to Wes Anderson on the exterior wall of his family home in Bushwick without asking for permission, New Yorker Will Giron wrote: “Gentrification has gotten to the point where every time I see a group of young white millennials in the hood my heart starts racing and a sense of anxiety starts falling over me.”

***
The argument that gentrification represents a kind of urban neocolonialism is hard to miss. Spike Lee made it clear with his viral rant against “Christopher Columbus syndrome” in Brooklyn. Indeed, after decades of “white flight” to the US suburbs, since 2010 American cities have seen increases in white populations. Protests in 2014 targeted Microsoft’s corporate shuttle buses in Seattle; not only did they raise rents, went the argument, they didn’t integrate, adding to social tensions in a city where working-class African-Americans were being pushed out. That same year, a video went viral of (older, whiter) Dropbox employees trying to get rid of mostly Latino young people from a football pitch in San Francisco’s Mission district. (The Latinos protested, and won.)

It is surely the higher-profile, less sensitive invasions that get the headlines, but they speak to a deeper malaise of newly arriving communities with no interest in connecting with the existing populations they are displacing. “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out,” they seem to say.

Inevitably, the rise of anti-gentrification sentiment and action has provoked a counter-attack, either to defend the process or deny it exists. Critics of gentrification romanticise working-class poverty, goes the main line of argument. They hate change, and fetishise urban decrepitude. Don’t you want the area to look nice? Don’t you want poor people to have better lives? Giles Coren characterised anti-gentrifiers last year as “middle-aged, middle-class dinosaurs who are determined to keep London shitty”. Why? A mixture, he said, of aesthetics, nostalgia and condescension: “Snobs [who] like the thought of people less well off than themselves scoffing rubbish [food], so they can keep on looking down at them for it”.

The Strata tower in Elephant & Castle, London. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian

This “shit but real” versus “polished but soulless” dichotomy was borne out in Hackney in London in 2009, when the borough’s mayor, Jules Pipe, condemned opponents of regeneration for wanting to “keep Hackney crap” – prompting a tongue-in-cheek campaign proposing to do exactly that. The sad irony is that local community groups calling for positive state intervention to regenerate a local area – for example, to make a local park safer, improve litter collection or fix transport – will often have to wait for the area to become more affluent and “desirable” before those changes will take place. And in a grim example of the law of unintended consequences, where urban communities do succeed in changing their neighbourhood for the better, the result is often higher rents, more interest from developers, and the gradual displacement of the very people who forced those changes into being.

Another argument used against anti-gentrification campaigns is that they are fighting a force of nature. Gentrification is a process as old as time itself, and you may as well just protest against the changing of the seasons. There is a tendency, as with anything, for older, more experienced commentators to take a puff on their pipe and remark, “Oh you hot-heads, do you think any of this is new?” This kind of response, while containing some truth, is often used to stifle action. “This has all happened before” carries with it an unstated corollary, “ ... and is thus an organic, inevitable and inexorable process – and, presumably, since we are both standing here today having this discussion, with all of our limbs intact, and roofs over our head, not an especially harmful one.”

It is true that the feared mass exodus of poorer residents from inner London since the Conservatives introduced the bedroom tax and benefit caps has not occurred. Anecdotal evidence from charities and food banks suggests many are staying, paying more rent and just getting poorer. But the numbers of those forced out are still increasing substantially. Many people who are placed in temporary accommodation in outer London – and deal with some horrendous conditions, jars of bugs and all – are travelling enormous distances to work or school. Perhaps the most dramatic single visualisation of how gentrification is changing our cities is this map of the displacement of former residents of Elephant & Castle’s substantial social housing project, the Heygate Estate.

As the critic Jonathan Meades wrote in 2006: “Privilege is centripetal. Want is centrifugal … in the future, deprivation, crime and riots will be comfortably confined to outside the ring road.”

The architects of gentrification are extremely careful not to talk about it. Given the word was coined by a Marxist, and is most often used by opponents of the property industry, this is good common sense on their part. When in 2014 I was asked to interview a property developer about gentrification, I worked through seven or eight before I found one willing to return my calls. Though I was careful not to scare them off by uttering the “G” word, their PR departments were too good at obfuscating – until someone at property giant Bouygues Development agreed to speak.

Richard Fagg, deputy managing director, was neither hostile nor evasive, but still chose his words carefully. He denied that their building of expensive new blocks of flats would lead to any displacement. Instead, he suggested that poorer areas would benefit from becoming “blended communities”.

“In the poor parts of London where we’ve been working in the past, they have been – and I use this term politely – but they have been social enclaves,” Fagg said. “No one buys homes there, because your money will probably depreciate. But that’s changing. So hopefully, the likes of where we’re working in Barking, people are taking their hard-earned cash, investing it in a mortgage, buying a property because there you’re getting good capital growth over time in the future. Yes, it’s starting at a low base. But you’re going to get good growth, because the whole area is changing. It’s not gentrification. It’s just becoming a more balanced community.”

Fagg was not factually wrong about the demographic composition of London areas such as Barking, north Peckham or Elephant & Castle. In fact, many are concerned that what’s happening to the Heygate Estate in Elephant & Castle will become an example that is replicated in the years to come. As the 1950s and 1960s tower blocks reach the end of their life – a decline hastened by years of disinvestment and failure to address poverty – one popular development model says they should be demolished and replaced with “mixed use” developments. Social problems are supposedly reduced if you don’t have “enclaves”.

Simon Elmer from Architects for Social Housing points to Andrew Adonis’s report City Villages: More Homes, Better Communities, which is the basis for Conservative housing plans, embodied in the housing bill currently going through parliament. The report recommends recategorising all social housing estates as brownfield land. In greater London, that amounts to 3,500 estates, 360,000 homes and more than one million people. The concern, says Elmer in a paper entitled The London Clearances, is that these ageing estates will be demolished and replaced with the same mix of luxury flats and “affordable” housing that have cropped up in Elephant Park, the new private development being built in place of the Heygate, and in which a two-bedroom flat will set you back £659,000. This past weekend David Cameron gave further shape to this plan when he announced a “blitz” on poverty, suggesting the demolition of “sink estates” in favour of more homes for private rent.

The property industry, meanwhile, has become markedly more sophisticated in how it readies the ground for demographic transformation, by engineering the change in atmosphere that will draw in young creatives to a “new” area. (Again, the colonial language is always bubbling just under the surface.) Sometimes this is called place-making, and amounts to extravagant marketing exercises that seek to brand (or rebrand) an area, to follow in the footsteps of the advertising industry and sell not just a product, the bricks and mortar, but an entire aspirational lifestyle.

“We don’t think it’s good enough to build a lovely flat, anyone can build a lovely flat anywhere,” Fagg told me. From the very first moment, even before seeking planning permission, “marketing is at the heart of your strategy. What are you offering over and above every London borough, every other developer? Particularly in London, when everyone is competing for your hard-earned capital to invest in their new location?” In some cases, place-making has meant going to extraordinary lengths: in poor parts of Harlem, estate agents bought up vacant street-front commercial properties and opened four trendy coffee shops, in an unabashed attempt to instigate gentrification themselves.

It isn’t the most flashy cultural manifestations of gentrification, the cereal cafes and the hipster baristas, who are the most influential actors in this process. Indeed, they are a distraction from where the most important decisions are taken. It is often the less glamorous and headline-grabbing developments, such as the granting of planning permission, the cynical redefining of “affordable housing” to mean 80% of market rate (it used to be more like 50%), the payment of cash to struggling councils by developers wishing to avoid their legal section 106 requirement to build affordable housing, or the eviction of poor families with no access to the media, that go under the radar, and where the real pain of gentrification resides.

Saying that, the cultural manifestations of gentrification do matter. It is partly about symbolism, about a change in atmosphere that tells poorer residents that, soon, they will no longer belong. Or, in areas with an explosion of attractive bars and clubs, it is about the behaviour of the new arrivals; where that sense of belonging is indirectly seized from poorer families by revellers, students and nightlife tourists who drunkenly smash their beer bottles on the pavement.

A new independent boutique coffee shop may be benign in itself, but does it help usher in a new clientele to the area, even as a bridge-and-tunnel, just-visiting crowd? Will other hipster businesses follow suit? Will this surge lead to a “buzz”, to press coverage in newspapers aimed at middle-classes with the money to buy property, or help to entice buy-to-let landlords, property developer interest, and estate agents’ reval‎uation? Does this then entice bigger chain shops and cafes, lead to small businesses closing and rents rising? As the hugely telling “place-making” videos make abundantly clear, for the money-men, a proliferation of art galleries, hipsters and small independent businesses are a great sign. Indeed, for the sharper investors, by the time Starbucks arrives, you’re already too late.

***
Last year I saw standup comedian Liam Williams tell a joke which went broadly as follows: “Everyone’s talking about gentrification at the moment, and I can understand why. But it’s a difficult one, isn’t it? There are so many pros and cons. On the one hand, your local area is nicer, safer, cleaner, there are cool new shops and cafes and bars to go to. But on the downside, you have to feel guilty about it.”

It was delivered sardonically, undoubtedly tongue-in-cheek, but was also a useful pointer to white, liberal, middle-class feeling. It was also an unintended guide to what we talk about when we talk about gentrification – that the filter for the media conversation remains depressingly narrow. The rise in volume of media coverage of gentrification in Britain has not been accompanied by a rise in awareness that minority citizens are more likely to be victims of displacement. The neighbourhoods on the receiving end of racial profiling and stop-and-search by police, or aggressive raids by border agents, are the same ones transforming into places ready to have the word “village” added to their name. For every story about the Focus E15 mums there have been two more along the lines of “I’m middle-class and even I’m being pushed out of London”.

 A man makes coffee at a boutique cafe in Brixton. Photograph: Carl Court/AFP/Getty Images

Hard though it clearly is for them to believe, gentrification is not about newspaper columnists who want a bigger garden having to move to zone three. It is about people like Maria, a single mum of three forced out of Westminster into damp, cold, asthma-inducing temporary accommodation in Haringey. Although she is pregnant and has back problems, when I met her Maria was taking her kids on the 90-minute, three-bus journey back to their school in Westminster every morning, just to retain a modicum of stability. She would then spend the day sitting, penniless, in Westfield shopping centre, to keep warm.

At other times there is a risk of chauvinism and outright xenophobia. Anti-gentrification artist Gram Hilleard had his sardonic postcards featured in the Observer last year, and in an accompanying interview lamented that his family had been in the same area of London for the last 200 years, “but now the indigenous Londoners have been moved out”. It’s not only suspect to talk about indigenous people in a major cosmopolitan city, it’s also a misunderstanding of what a city like London has always been.

Today, more than 300 languages are spoken and 36.7% of the population were born overseas; the proportion of people who can claim their family have been in the same area of any major city for 200 years continuously must be microscopically small. Legitimate coverage of super-rich Qatari, Chinese or Emirati investors buying up high-end properties in London and then leaving them empty can easily be taken out of proportion, and spill over into the misguided notion that the problem is wealthy foreigners, not wealthy investors. But what about our plucky homegrown rentiers, not to mention those granting planning permission to luxury flats and hotels rather than concentrating on building genuinely affordable homes?

Gentrification is a viscerally emotive subject. People take it incredibly personally. As the debate grows louder, fingers will be pointed wildly in every direction. I think I first noticed gentrification, before I’d ever heard the word, when the branch of the discount supermarket Iceland in Balham, where I grew up in the 1980s, closed and was replaced by an organic supermarket called As Nature Intended.

In my childhood, this part of London wasn’t particularly one thing or the other; neither particularly posh nor poor, central but not that central, mixed by race and class and age, the kind of area that thrived precisely because it didn’t have a particularly clear identity. A couple of years after the organic supermarket opened, I saw a property advert on the tube that had created annoying alliterative couplets out of different London place names. Balham was “Bankers’ Balham”. I have rarely felt so ashamed. But I also know that none of this is at all important, in the scheme of things – that places change, and they should change, and getting a bit sentimental about the fact you can’t go home again is part of growing up.

The challenge for the citizens of the 21st century is to decouple this kind of personal sentiment from the generally unheard or ignored stories of displacement and suffering, from the resounding triumph of private profit in civic life over everything else – trampling, in particular, the idea that shelter and the right to the city ought to be fundamental human rights. Gentrification is becoming one of the defining issues of our age.

As rich and poor people alike continue to flock to cities like London, Berlin and San Francisco, either for work or a better quality of life, the controversies will only intensify and multiply. Apologists for gentrification can continue to pretend a city is a force of nature, and displacement of poor people from their homes just ripples on the tide, but the rising popular sentiment against social cleansing is not merely a fabrication of leftwing activists, academics or journalists. The anger is real, and the determination to resist is growing.

Article source : https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/jan/12/gentrification-argument-protest-backlash-urban-generation-displacement

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< Questions >

Q1. What is the inclusive growth? Could you suggest any idea to achieve the inclusive growth while we are carrying out gentrification? 

Q2. Have you ever heard about the word 'gentrification', ' regeneration' or 'redevelopment'? Do you know the definition of those terminologies? Could you distinguish each word from others?

Q3. What images are coming up when you hear the words home, identity and community? Do you know the meaning of City village?

Q4. This article suggested that gentrification can cause the social cleansing which causes fractured community. What is the meaning of social cleansing or urban neocolonialism? What is wrong with it?

Q5. Last June, Berlin made headlines when it began enforcing rent controls for all, limiting landlords to charging new tenants more than 10% above the local average. What do you think of Berlin's policy?

Q6. Do you find any place to keep without changing in your urban area even while it went through gentrification? For example Berlin's case which keep 'very local geographies'?

Q7. What is the 'Right to the City' which is suggested idea by UN Habitat? How about the 'Digital Right to the City'? Do you know the meaning by those expressions?

*** The right to the city

The right to the city is an idea and a slogan that was first proposed by Henri Lefebvre in his 1968 book Le Droit à la ville.

Lefebvre summarizes the idea as a "demand...[for] a transformed and renewed access to urban life". David Harvey described it as follows:

    The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.

It has been suggested that the phrase has taken on a variety of meanings and Marcelo Lopes de Souza has argued that as the right to the city has become "fashionable these days", "[t]he price of this has often been the trivialisation and corruption of Lefebvre's concept" and called for fidelity to the original radical meaning of the idea.

A number of popular movements, such as the shack dwellers' movement Abahlali baseMjondolo in South Africa, the Right to the City Alliance in the United States, Recht auf Stadt, a network of squatters, tenants and artists in Hamburg, and various movements in Asia and Latin America, have incorporated the idea of the right to the city into their struggles.

In Brazil the 2001 City Statute wrote the Right to the City into federal law.

More recently, scholars have proposed a 'Digital Right to the City', which involves thinking about the city as not just bricks and mortar, but also digital code and information.

Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_the_city

Q8. Do you satisfy with your living condition? Do you think your residing area satisfy with
the 'Right to the City' or the 'Digital Right to the City' ?

Q9. Do you find any site where was currently redeveloped because of old buildings? Please compare the current environment to the past environment?

Q10. What is the advantages and disadvantages of gentrification?

Q11. Why should we think about the community when we are enacting gentrification?

Q12. Above article suggested that we should take into consideration the 'Right to the City' concept for all urban dwellers equally. In this perspective what is the public sector's role in gentrification agenda?

Q13. Could you find any place which is the not only most historical but intriguing place for you in your region? Why did you select this place?

Q14. Have you ever visited Sooamgol in Cheongju? What do you think of this place?

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Why this Danish city is rebuilding itself out of recycled rubble

08 Mar 2018/ Ida Auken/ Member of Parliament, Parliament of Denmark (Folketinget)

I am fortunate enough to live in one of the greenest cities on the planet: Copenhagen. The 2014 European Green Capital is a city where four out of 10 people commute by bike. It has more than 390km of cycle lanes and has set itself the ambitious goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2025.

But now the city is moving to the next level of green transition by asking: what if you could recycle whole buildings?

Sustainable architects Lendager are wholesale devotees of the circular economy. Its flagship Resource Rows development began by asking a question: as Denmark’s population urbanizes at a clip – Copenhagen alone is expected to see a 15% population growth in the next 10 years – why are only people and not their buildings moving to cities?

Located in Copenhagen’s Ørestad district – a reclaimed wetlands that has become a showcase for urban design projects – Resource Rows uses walls from abandoned rural dwellings as part of facades, reducing carbon consumption by 70% but also providing a weathered character that sets the development apart from your average city new build. The buildings interact intelligently with nature, harvesting rainwater for toilet-flushing and irrigation, while green roofs and vertical gardens encourage biodiversity and enhance community. And that’s not all: in Resource Rows the company has recycled masses of waste concrete and kilometres of surplus wood produced during the expansion of the Copenhagen Metro which ordinarily would have been junked.

As a citizen of our capital, I am happy that my city is doing well and growing, but I am concerned about what is happening in the country as a whole. Mass relocation is a problem that affects rural areas across Denmark and, as people leave their country houses for lives in the city, the difficulty of reselling them means many are left abandoned, creating a blight of abandoned buildings.

I am more than happy, therefore, that Lendager has spotted this gap and has started to bridge it. While these buildings are nothing but waste in one location, impossible to maintain and too costly to haul down, they also contain materials of proven quality that are ready certified and non-toxic. Recycling them means Resource Rows is “Denmark’s first ever residential area built out of materials from abandoned homes”.

But the real feather in Lendager’s cap is possibly its Local Recycling Centre in the harbour district of Nordhavn. With its ingenious design – built from 90% upcycled materials – it reimagines your average, dreary, municipal recycling facility as a fun, instructive and social space, which makes the sorting of waste an intuitive and interactive process.

To drop off their recycling, visitors enter sections of the building constructed from the items they would like to deliver – the glass room handles glass, the plastic room handles plastic and so forth. At the middle of the circular facility is a swap shelf, where people can hand over items that are still functional or need only light repairs, and a space that can be used for lectures, workshops and flea markets. Through the building, you can see a real attempt to make recycling part of the city’s culture and conversation and not just part of its infrastructure.

Rising from the rubble

Lendager aren’t the only Danish company seeing gold where others might see dirt. Cleantech firm Gamle Mursten, which literally translates as "old bricks", takes a more hands-on and selective approach to recycling abandoned rural dwellings. The firm’s team of engineers retrieves old bricks from houses built before 1960 (sadly, the bricks from buildings made after 1960 cannot be reused because of the use of mortar and cement), before cleaning them by hand and machine using a patented technology and selling them to construction firms or using them to build homes, colleges and warehouses.

A famous example is the old Carlsberg Brewery in Copenhagen where most of the bricks have been retrieved and used in new buildings, giving the new building a history and a soul from the very beginning.

According to the company, “every time you replace a new brick with a reused brick, you save the environment 0.5kg of CO2”. But that isn’t the only benefit: by tearing down derelict buildings, these connoisseurs of waste clear a path for much-needed rural development.

Meanwhile, despite the labour involved in cleaning the bricks, Gamle Mursten’s projects often cost less than they would if built from scratch. They also bring the brickwork’s history to life once more, as the new owners discover information about the old buildings that are now part of their homes.

Finally, Copenhagen has a restaurant with a similar appetite for change. Designed by Genbyg, Danish purveyor of upcycled building ware, the Nordic-themed Vaekst in the city’s old Latin quarter is centred around a remarkable indoor greenhouse constructed from reused materials – the ideal space to enjoy its vegetable-based menu.

The bar shelves were once file drawers in the National Museum of Denmark’s archives, while the counter consists of former factory floorboards and overhead lamps have been fashioned out of old milk containers. Most interestingly of all, the mahogany deployed throughout the restaurant had an eventful previous life as a grandstand at an athletics stadium in Lyngby.

So there we have it: Copenhagen, a city with architectural practices to cheer about. We are turning the city in to a model for the circular economy, with citizens leading the way, because it makes perfect sense environmentally, economically and for the people who live there.

Article source : https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/03/copenhagen-denmark-rebuilding-recycled-rubble

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Paris wants to build a forest 5 times larger than Central Park
27 Feb 2018/ Leanna Garfield/ Reporter, Tech Insider

For over 15 years, the city of Paris has planned to plant a new forest on the plain at Pierrelaye-Bessancourt, an outer suburb. But the plan has faced roadblocks as people debate the best use for the land.
French politicians are now actively pushing to make the re-greening project a reality.
The SMAPP plan calls for 5.2 square miles of trees and plants. For perspective, that's about five times the size of New York City's Central Park.
The forest would be approximately 18 miles northwest of Paris' city center.

The site at Pierrelaye-Bessancourt borders roads and is close to the Seine River.

For around a century, Pierrelaye-Bessancourt has been a literal wasteland. From 1896 to the 1990s, the city of Paris sprayed sewage residue across 865 acres of the fields to fertilize them. (Researchers later concluded the technique polluted the soil.)

Today, the area acts as an unofficial landfill for Parisian trash.

Paris now wants to transform the area into a lush forest. For the trees to reach maturity, it would take 30 to 50 years.

As the diagram below shows, the forest would feature hiking trails, an equestrian center, conservation areas, a few parking lots, as well as observation decks.

The forest would create a habitat for plants and wildlife. It would also help lower greenhouse-gas emissions since trees consume CO2. The site would be relatively free of cars, which contribute heavily to carbon emissions as well.

The project is one of the city's latest efforts to reduce air pollution in and around Paris.

In recent years, Paris has tried to install more pedestrian-oriented green spaces in the city. For example, a new car-less park and promenade along the Seine River opened in summer 2016.

As CityLab notes, the forestry project will likely face some challenges. As many as 1,500 trailers are squatting on the land, and getting full approval will require a lengthy series of community meetings.

The plan to devote such a large swath of land to a forest rather than a money-making development is certainly ambitious. But it also signals a growing urban movement to green-ify the world's cities.

In the past decade, Chicago has invested hundreds of millions of dollars toward revitalizing and building more parks in the city. And in 2015, Singapore built a 250-acre development of "supertrees" — high-tech structures featuring more than 150,000 plants that collect solar energy. Ino Aguascalientes, Mexico, an oil pipeline was recently converted into a public park — La Línea Verde — that passes through 90 neighborhoods.

article source : https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/02/paris-wants-to-build-a-massive-forest-that-would-be-5-times-larger-than-central-park?utm_content=buffer6c57f&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

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This South Korean city eliminates the need to drive

17 Nov 2017/ Leanna Garfield/ Reporter, Tech Insider

When residents of the International Business District (IBD) in Songdo, South Korea go to work, pick up their kids from school, or shop for groceries, driving is optional.

That's because the $35 billion district — currently a work-in-progress about the size of downtown Boston — was designed to eliminate the need for cars.

A project that began in 2002, the area prioritizes mass transit, like buses, subways, and bikes, instead of road traffic, according to Stan Gale, the chairman of Gale International, the developer behind the IBD.

When completed by 2020, the district will span 100 million square feet.

Take a look at the IBD's plan below.

In Songdo City, South Korea, Gale International is building the International Business District (IBD) on reclaimed land along the Yellow Sea.

From the first planning stage, the developers aimed to make the district eco-friendly. One strategy was designing the area to reduce the need for cars.

BD features a mixed-use urban plan, meaning its retail, office space, parks, medical facilities, and schools are all close to housing. Most non-residential buildings are walking distance from everything else.

Apartment buildings and businesses were built 12 minutes within bus or subway stops.

Fifteen miles of bike lanes go through the district, connecting to a larger 90-mile network in Songdo City.

Around 40% of the area is reserved for green space (about double that of New York City), which also encourages residents to walk, Gale said.

IBD's largest park, measuring 101 acres, was inspired by Manhattan's Central Park.

"What you see today in Songdo, a city that is compact and very much walkable, is a direct outcome of this thoughtful approach to planning," Gale said.

The IBD is one part of a larger development, called the Incheon Free Economic Zone in Songdo City, spearheaded by the South Korean government.

When the government started planning Songdo City in 2000, 500 tons of sand were poured into the marshland to lay the foundation.

Currently, 20,000 residential units are complete or under construction in IBD, where around 50,000 people live. Approximately 100,000 residents live in the greater Songdo City.

Another perk of living in the district: there are no trash trucks. Instead, a pneumatic tube system sucks the trash from chutes in residential buildings to a central sorting facility in seconds. There, it's either turned into energy or recycled.

IBD has over 100 buildings that are LEED-certified — the world's most widely used green rating system.

The development is shooting for LEED certification at a neighborhood scale, and plans to recycle 40% of the water used.

Songdo City produces a third fewer greenhouse gases compared to another city of the same size.

However, some residents have complained that the IBD and the larger Songdo City are too secluded from Seoul — the country's economic, political, and cultural hub. It takes over an hour to reach the capital.

Around 70,000 people work in Songdo, which is far fewer than the 300,000 people the city government had envisioned.

For that reason, it could be too early to say whether Songdo will become a thriving urban center.

"In a lot of ways, it’s the city Koreans want to show the world, in that it’s a clean, futuristic-looking place with no visible poverty," Colin Marshall, a Seoul-based essayist who writes about cities, told The Los Angeles Times.

The IBD currently measures 60 million square feet. By 2020, it will nearly double.

The developers hope that the city will become a model for other cities around the world.

Article source : https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/11/south-korea-is-building-a-35-billion-city-designed-to-eliminate-the-need-for-cars?utm_content=bufferd9c58&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

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< Questions >

Q1. Where is the most attractive and livable city for you between Copenhagen, Songdo and Paris?

Q2. What is the most important quality when you are choosing a place to live?

Q3. If your house is built by up-cycled construction materials from suburban area with historical stories, how would you feel about that?

Q4. In 2015, Singapore built a 250-acre development of "supertrees" — high-tech structures featuring more than 150,000 plants that collect solar energy. If there are park with those facilities in your city, would you visit that place? How do you think about this idea?

Q5. Which one do you like the most between living in a urban area and living in a suburban area? Why?

Q6. How do you think about living in a city without cars?

Q7. How do you think about living in a huge natural central park where you can enjoy various outdoor activities and natural atmosphere?

Q8. How do you think about the city which has unique and eco-friendly buildings using recycled rubble?

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12 ways to get smarter – in one chart

12 Feb 2018/ Jeff Desjardins/ Founder and editor of Visual Capitalist

The level of a person’s raw intelligence, as measured by aptitude tests such as IQ scores, is generally pretty stable for most people during adulthood. While it’s true that there are things you can do to fine tune your natural capabilities, such as doing brain exercises, puzzle solving, and getting optimal sleep – the amount of raw brainpower you have is difficult to increase in any meaningful or permanent way.

For those of you who strive to be high-performers, this may seem like bad news. If processing power can't be increased, then how can life’s increasingly complex problems be solved?

The key is mental models

The good news is that while raw cognitive abilities matter, it’s how you use and harness those abilities that really makes the difference. The world’s most successful people, from Ray Dalio to Warren Buffett, are not necessarily leagues above the rest of us in raw intelligence – they have simply developed and applied better mental models of how the world works, and they use these principles to filter their thoughts, decisions, strategies, and execution.

Today’s infographic comes from best-selling author and entrepreneur Michael Simmons, who has collected over 650 mental models through his work. The image, in a similar style to one we previously published on cognitive biases, synthesizes these models down to the most useful and universal mental models that people should learn to master first.

Concepts such as the 80/20 rule (Pareto’s principle), compound interest, and network effects are summarized in the visualization, and their major components are broken down further within the circle.

Mental model example

In a recent Medium post by Simmons, he highlights a well-known mental model that is the perfect breadcrumb to start with. The 80/20 rule (Pareto’s principle) is named after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who was likely the first person to note the 80/20 connection in an 1896 paper.

In short, it shows that 20% of inputs (work, time, effort) often leads to 80% of outputs (performance, sales, revenue, etc.), creating an extremely vivid mental framework for making prioritization decisions.

The 80/20 rule represents a power law distribution that has been empirically shown to exist throughout nature, and it also has huge implications on business.

If you focus your effort on these 20% of tasks first, and get the most out of them, you will be able to drive results much more efficiently than wasting time on the 80% “long tail” shown below.

This is just one example of how a powerful mental model can be effective in making you work more intelligently.

Article source : https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/02/how-to-be-smarter-infographic

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< Questions >

Q1. Do you carry out any treatment to tune your natural capabilities? For example, doing brain exercises, puzzle solving, and getting optimal sleep.

Q2. How can we be more productive with our performance with life’s increasingly complex problems?

Q3. This article suggested that we can improve our performance by using specific mental model which is applying concepts such as the 80/20 rule (Pareto’s principle), compound interest, and network effects. For instance, If you focus your effort on these 20% of tasks first, and get the most out of them, you will be able to drive results much more efficiently than wasting time on the 80% “long tail” shown below.
Do you have any experience to improve your work efficiency by applying 80/20 rule?

Q4. Are you good at making high performance in a short time? Otherwise, do you need longer duration to make your best performance?

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Disease X: Unknown Pathogen Could Cause Epidemic

That Can Kill Millions Worldwide
10 March 2018, 9:28 pm EST By Allan Adamson Tech Times

Every year, the World Health Organization convenes scientists and health workers from around the world to identify diseases with epidemic or pandemic potentials.

These diseases could kill millions but currently, do not have enough countermeasures available.

Global Threat

In the previous years, leading bacteriologists, virologists, and infectious disease experts identified known killers such as the Lassa fever and Ebola, the hemorrhagic disease that killed over 11,000 people in West Africa between the years 2013 and 2016.

This year, however, a still unknown pathogen has been added to the list. The world's leading health experts have identified Disease X as a global threat.

Disease X

WHO said that Disease X could be caused by a pathogen that is not yet identified to cause human disease. Disease X is something that may go unnoticed until it is too late when it has already spread fast and caught the world by surprise.

"Disease X represents the knowledge that a serious international epidemic could be caused by a pathogen currently unknown to cause human disease, and so the R&D Blueprint explicitly seeks to enable cross-cutting R&D preparedness that is also relevant for an unknown "Disease X" as far as possible," WHO said in a statement.

Experts said that Disease X may emerge from a variety of sources and may strike anytime. It could emerge from an accident or act of terror amid advances in gene-manipulating technologies that now make possible the creation of entirely new viruses.

Evolving Diseases

While WHO focuses on yet to be identified pathogens in its description of Disease X, there is also the risk that existing diseases could evolve.

Tuberculosis, for instance, is a constantly evolving disease. In its most basic form, TB infection can be treated using simple antibiotic but the bacteria behind tuberculosis has evolved resistance to an antibiotic. A multidrug-resistant TB has so far been reported in 117 countries and affected about 490,000 people worldwide.

Disease X could also be sparked by diseases jumping from animals to humans and then spread to become an epidemic or pandemic.

There are currently more than 200 zoonotic diseases caused by viruses, parasites, bacteria, and fungi that are directly or indirectly transferred by animals to humans. These include MERS, Ebola, anthrax, bubonic plague, and mad cow disease.

"Scientists estimate that more than 6 out of every 10 known infectious diseases in people are spread from animals, and 3 out of every 4 new or emerging infectious diseases in people are spread from animals," the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

Article source : http://www.techtimes.com/articles/222770/20180310/disease-x-unknown-pathogen-could-cause-epidemic-that-can-kill-millions-worldwide.htm

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Beware 'Disease X': the mystery killer keeping scientists awake at night

Alanna Shaikh / 10 March 2018 • 8:00pm

Over two days in early February, the World Health Organisation (WHO) convened an expert committee at its Geneva headquarters to consider the unthinkable.

The goal was to identify pathogens with the potential to spread and kill millions but for which there are currently no, or insufficient, countermeasures available. As the meeting opened, the city’s eponymous lake reflected a crisp blue winter sky. Only as the meeting progressed did an icy rain set in.

It was the third time the committee, consisting of leading virologists, bacteriologists and infectious disease experts, had met to consider diseases with epidemic or pandemic potential. But when the 2018 list was released two weeks ago it included an entry not seen in previous years.

In addition to eight frightening but familiar diseases including Ebola, Zika, and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), the list included a ninth global threat: Disease X.

What is Disease X?

Disease X is not a newly identified pathogen but what military planners call a “known unknown”. It’s a disease sparked by a biological mutation, or perhaps an accident or terror attack, that catches the world by surprise and spreads fast.

By including it on the list, the WHO is acknowledging that infectious diseases and the epidemics they spawn are inherently unpredictable. Like the Spanish flu which killed 50m to 100m people between 1918 and 1920, Disease X is the catastrophe nobody saw coming until it was too late.

“Disease X represents the knowledge that a serious international epidemic could be caused by a pathogen currently unknown,” says the WHO. 

It has been included on the list not to terrify us, but to ensure that the global health community builds the resilience and capacity needed to tackle all threats - not just the predictable ones.

Where might it come from?

One source of Disease X could be the deliberate utilisation of infectious disease as a weapon.

While bio-weapons have been used since the middle ages (the Tartars catapulted the cadavers of plague victims into the besieged seaport of Caffa in 1346, for example), new scientific developments including gene editing and an exponential increase in computing power make it easier than ever to develop lethal biological agents.

The US and USSR explored bio-weapon development during the Cold War and both continue to hold live cultures of deadly pathogens, including the smallpox virus, in secretive and (hopefully) secure labs. More recently, the Iraqi military toyed with botulinum toxins under Saddam Hussein, Al Qaeda operatives experimented with anthrax and, in 2014, a laptop captured from Islamic State (IS) was found to contain instructions on how to weaponise the plague virus.

North Korea and Syria are also thought to have bio warfare capability. Syria, which has been using chemical weapons against civilian populations in the current conflict, suffered a rare smallpox outbreak in 1972 and is believed to have held wild smallpox strains within its military-industrial complex ever since. Equally alarming, anthrax antibodies were detected in the blood of a North Korean military defector last year, raising fears that Pyongyang has a store of weaponised anthrax.

On the bright side, the number of incidents involving bioweapons to date has been very low, with hoaxes far outnumbering genuine attacks. Non-state actors, including IS, appear to lack the capacity to develop a bio-weapon with large scale reach.

But this could change. It has long been feared, for instance, that military grade pathogens could leak from Soviet labs onto the black market and into the hands of terrorists.

Only last year Canadian researchers published a peer-reviewed paper detailing how they had synthetically engineered horsepox (a close relative of the smallpox virus) from scratch using equipment now which falls within the reach of many terror groups.

The paper’s publication has been widely condemned as a security breach. The details provided could “substantively assist those with lesser degrees of experience to synthesize smallpox”, said one critic.

“The synthesis of horsepox virus takes the world one step closer to the reemergence of smallpox as a threat to global health security”, said another.

What about animals?
Bio-weapons are one risk, animals another.

The most probable source of Disease X is zoonotic diseases, or Zoonoses. These are diseases present in wild and domesticated animals that can be transmitted to humans.

Some 70% of newly discovered diseases in the last century have been zoonotic. The hemorrhagic bug Ebola is a prime example. The 2013-2016 West African pandemic is believed to have started when a one-year-old boy was bitten by an Ebola-infected bat in Guinea. The disease spread to his mother, sister and grandmother and then on to kill more than 11,000 people in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

HIV is also a zoonosis. The human HIV epidemic most likely began when someone killed and ate a wild chimpanzee. It has since infected some 70m people and killed 35m.

Domestic livestock are the most likely incubator for Disease X. Large groups of farm animals (chickens, pigs and even camels) kept in close quarters create ideal breeding conditions for zoonotic disease. The viruses, constantly mutating, move rapidly from wild animals to farm animals and then on to humans. They can be spread by ticks but the fastest moving are airborne.

Disease X could be a mutation of an existing animal disease like avian influenza or African swine fever or it could be a brand-new pathogen that moves from animals to humans. As we farm, mine and colonize ever more remote locations of the planet, the more likely we are to come into contact with as yet unknown animal bugs. Cutting down the African bush for farmland or mining the Brazilian rainforest presents a constant risk of exposure to new zoonotic diseases.

Hiding in plain sight

Although the WHO focuses on unknown pathogens in its description of Disease X, another major pandemic risk comes from the potential evolution of existing diseases.

HIV, Tuberculosis, and influenza have already demonstrated their capacity for devastating epidemic spread. Global health infrastructure currently keeps them under control through a combination of surveillance, effective treatments - and good luck.

Influenza is one of the biggest threats. This was proven in 2009 when H1N1 (swine flu) went rapidly pandemic. 213 countries and territories reported cases of the virus and an estimated 285,000 people died in its wake.

That is a massive number, but it represents a case fatality rate of just .02%. Approximately one out of 5 people on the planet were infected, but very few died. In other words, H1N1 was highly infectious, but it was not highly virulent.

On the other hand, H151 avian influenza has a mortality rate in humans of about 60%. At present, H151 does not spread human-to-human. However, it could easily evolve and a virus with the infectiousness of H1N1 and the mortality rate of H151 would be devastating.

Tuberculosis (TB) is another continually evolving disease. The most basic forms of TB infection are cured with simple antibiotic treatment, but the bacteria which cause Tuberculosis are rapidly developing resistance to antibiotics. In 2016, an estimated 490,000 people worldwide developed multidrug resistant TB and it has been reported in 117 countries worldwide.

HIV is a third existing pandemic that could slip out of control. Antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) allow people with the condition to live normal healthy lives. However, HIV is also becoming resistant to treatment. Among countries that report relevant data to the WHO, 10-15% of people are diagnosed with HIV which is resistant to the standard antiviral treatments.

These numbers could get worse. “HIV is the fastest mutating organism on the planet”, said Dr. Edsel Salvana, an infectious disease specialist at the University of the Philippines. “We are seeing new strains of HIV that are highly aggressive and develop drug resistance faster. We need to stay on top of this with careful surveillance, and we need to develop new and more durable drugs.”

Doing battle with Disease X

How do you prepare for a threat you cannot predict?

The WHO has chosen a tried and tested approach to preparing for Disease X. Its doctrine flies under the age old banner of “preparedness”.

By improving disease surveillance and strengthening the capacity of local health systems across the globe, it aims to spot an outbreak early, contain it and kill it off before it spreads.

Few experts, if any, disagree with the approach - it’s really the only one we have - but many wonder if adequate health care facilities exist on the ground internationally to make it work.

Dr Nahid Bhadelia, Medical Director of Special Pathogens at Boston University Medical Center, compared the system of preventing the spread of new diseases to a city building a series of dams or seawalls to protect itself from floods. In the case of diseases, the presence of a strong local health system provides the vital early warning and treatment needed to contain the outbreak.

"Not helping strengthen international capacity to combat infectious diseases is like refusing to build barriers against the tide in some parts of our ‘global city’ and expecting to be protected when the flood comes."

Supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Find out more

Article source : https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/0/beware-disease-x-mystery-killer-keeping-scientists-awake-night/

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< Questions >

Q1. What images are in your mind when you hear the word 'disease' or 'virus'?

Q2. Could you explain what the Disease X is?

Q3. According to WHO, Disease X is included into the list with eight frightening but familiar diseases such as Ebola, Zika, and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). But we don't know how to treat them properly until now. What do you think about Disease X?

Q4. How dangerous is DNA-changing technology?

Q5. What would you do if there was a sudden epidemic?

Q6. How serious is the threat from bio-weapons or deadly viruses?

Q7. Should there be a travel ban if there is an epidemic?

Q8. Is it better to live in the countryside to avoid diseases?

Q9. What's the worst virus you've ever had?

Q10. Are you careful about keeping germs away?

Q11. Will scientists destroy all viruses one day?