This paper highlights the major challenges and considerations for addressing COVID-19 in informal settlements. It discusses what is known about vulnerabilities and how to support local protective action. There is heightened concern about informal urban settlements because of the combination of population density and inadequate access to water and sanitation, which makes standard advice about social distancing and washing hands implausible. There are further challenges to do with the lack of reliable data and the social, political and economic contexts in each setting that will influence vulnerability and possibilities for action. The potential health impacts of COVID-19 are immense in informal settlements, but if control measures are poorly executed these could also have severe negative impacts. Public health interventions must be balanced with social and economic interventions, especially in relation to the informal economy upon which many poor urban residents depend. Local residents, leaders and community-based groups must be engaged and resourced to develop locally appropriate control strategies, in partnership with local governments and authorities. Historically, informal settlements and their residents have been stigmatized, blamed, and subjected to rules and regulations that are unaffordable or unfeasible to adhere to. Responses to COVID-19 should not repeat these mistakes. Priorities for enabling effective control measures include: collaborating with local residents who have unsurpassed knowledge of relevant spatial and social infrastructures, strengthening coordination with local governments, and investing in improved data for monitoring the response in informal settlements.

This paper argues that contemporary processes of extended urbanisation, which include suburbanisation, post-suburbanisation and peri-urbanisation, may result in increased vulnerability to infectious disease spread. Through a review of existing literature at the nexus of urbanisation and infectious disease, we consider how this (potential) increased vulnerability to infectious diseases in peri-or suburban areas is in fact dialectically related to socio-material transformations on the metropolitan edge. In particular, we highlight three key factors influencing the spread of infectious disease that have been identified in the literature: demographic change, infrastructure and governance. These have been chosen given both the prominence of these themes and their role in shaping the spread of disease on the urban edge. Further, we suggest how a landscape political ecology framework can be useful for examining the role of socioecological transformations in generating increased risk of infectious disease in peri-and suburban areas. To illustrate our arguments we will draw upon examples from various re-emerging infectious disease events and outbreaks around the world to reveal how extended urbanisation in the broadest sense has amplified the conditions necessary for the spread of infectious diseases. We thus call for future research on the spatialities of health and disease to pay attention to how variegated patterns of extended urbanisation may influence possible outbreaks and the mechanisms through which such risks can be alleviated.

This commentary focuses on the relationship between extensive forms of urbanization and emerging infectious disease, using empirical examples from the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, it examines the role of shifting urban-ecological relationships, infrastructures, and governance dynamics in both giving rise to, and mitigating, the impact of infectious disease outbreaks.

The concept of planetary urbanization has emerged in recent years amongst neo‐Lefebvrian urban scholars who see urbanization as a process taking place at all spatial scales. This article analyses recent critiques of the urban political ecology (UPE) literature which argue that much of the work in the field has been guilty of focusing exclusively on the traditional bounded city unit rather than urbanization as a process. In response, the article reviews various strands of the UPE literature which have (always) moved beyond ‘the city’ to consider the various metabolisms and circulations of humans and non‐humans connecting cities with places outside of their borders at a variety of scales. Furthermore, it suggests how these approaches can productively work with the insights of the planetary urbanization literature, in considering both the changing nature of urbanization and also the socio‐ecological and political implications of these changes. Finally, the article suggests how the methodological approach of the ‘site multiple’ and its focus on everyday practices and lived experiences can be useful for researching diverse urban phenomena and their more‐than‐urban connections.

In previous engagements with political ecologies, cultural geographers have been interested in intersections between place making and environmental health, nature, environment and landscape interrelations, and their mutually co-constituted, socially constructed and contested nature. This article explores these themes through the experiences of urban activists in George Town, Penang, who have been involved in resisting the proliferation of 'swiftlet farms' in residential areas. 'Swiftlet farms' are typically converted shophouses or other buildings which have been modified for the purpose of harvesting the nests of the edible-nest swiftlet. They have generated significant controversy in George Town given their perceived impacts on urban health, quality of life, and (in)tangible forms of urban heritage. In examining spaces of the city that have been transformed through the 'swiftlet farming' industry, this article aims to highlight the ways in which individuals experience everyday landscapes of swiftlet farming, and how they might engage in reshaping them. In tracing this controversy, the article develops the conceptual framing of landscape political ecology, which allows for a closer understanding of the socio-natural production, transformation and contestation of urban landscapes. The research is based on 6 months of participatory ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Malaysia, much of which was developed in collaboration with local stakeholders. The article concludes with a reflection on how the particular approach set out here can shed important light on the role of praxis and everyday lived experience in shaping contemporary urban environmental politics.