A landscape planning agenda for global health security: Learning from the history of HIV/AIDS and pandemic influenza

•Defines the general issue of Emerging Infectious Diseases in the context of landscape planning.•Proposes a “global urban ecosystem” (GUE) conceptual framework to best understand how pandemics occur.•Outlines pandemic HIV/AIDS and pandemic influenza as the result of the global urban ecosystem. This paper considers the role of landscape planning and design in the context of a growing need for research and policy recommendations associated with Emerging Infectious Diseases (EIDs), of which COVID-19 is the most recent. Beginning with a definition of EIDs and their origins within the context of landscape planning, the paper then argues that planning and design scholars and practitioners should begin by seeing the importance of a “global urban ecosystem” (GUE) comprised of rapidly transforming metropolitan and regional “patches” connected through “corridors” of relatively unregulated global transportation and mobility networks. It then revisits the history of the two prior global pandemics of HIV/AIDS and pandemic influenza to establish the importance of a landscape planning perspective at the intersection of wildlife, livestock, and globally connected human communities. The essay concludes by arguing that this GUE concept can facilitate creative planning and design by adapting concepts established in other patch and corridor networks like urban transit systems to the ongoing risk of future pandemic EIDs.