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Town Planning Review. 92(2), 209-213 COVID-19, Spatio-epidemiology and Urban PlanningCognisant of the ongoing spatial manifestations of COVID-19, this essay provides reflections for current and future urban planning. The essay argues that planners should pay attention to the changing nature of urban spaces, currently interjected by epidemiological relations, and identify actions towards potentially damaging future implications. Specifically, post COV1D-19 planning must advocate against socio-spatial segregation of former COVID-19 hotspots and survivors. In effect, planning policies must avert epidemiological redlining and initiate long-term strategies to create inclusive public spaces. Spaces of Advocacy and Renewal after COVID-19Urban life has always been characterised by the trappings of anonymity, opportunity and even risk. COVID-19 has fundamentally intensified the risks of urban life; the pandemic has been a particularly urbanpossibly peri-urban (Keil et al., 2020)phenomenon. It has introduced a form of epidemiological relation in urban spaces, blurring the lines between health and infirmity. The hospital has always occupied a fringe aspect of the urban imagination, providing a space for treatment, observation, inoculation and recovery from ailments. With the emergence of COVID-19 however, the spaces of epidemiological observation and treatment have extended beyond hospitals into urban spaces in general. COVID-19 is characterised by different strains and susceptibilities to infection; for instance, younger people have comparatively milder symptoms. In effect, urban social relations have become epidemiological relations; mere proximity and movement prompts questions of one's state of health. Everyday spaces are deemed as potential hotspots; every urbanite potentially infectious. Proximity, movement and location have become matters of urban-health and public policy. Various urban planning strategies have therefore been introduced to regulate urban spaces, movement, proximity and risks of infection. One such strategy is the tracking of potential COVID-19 urban hotspots and populations. During the bubonic plague in sixth century Constantinople, urbanites were required to wear name tags in public

We examine the role of resource materiality in extractive labour protests in Ghana. Focusing on petroleum and gold mining, we centre contestations as part of the resources’ socio-natural constituents. Research data was obtained from social conflict databases, newspapers and field interviews. The analysis focused on themes and discourses on protest emergence, mobilisation, negotiation and impacts. Findings show how petroleum labour protesters use passivity and chokepoints to impede gas supply to households. Ghana petroleum workers attempt to garner structural power through workplace power, albeit unsuccessfully. Conversely, gold mineworkers protest by actively reappropriating machinery and extraction spaces. They centre protests in mining towns to emphasise their work as lifeblood. The ‘landedness’ of gold and the introduction of surface mining reshaped such protest tactics. Thus, materiality can help excavate the relational and comparative logic, tactics and potentialities of labour power in resource extracting countries. We suggest extractive labour to forge stronger cross-class coalitions to align workplace exploitation with broader issues of accumulation by dispossession.

Focusing on the United Nations’ Agenda 2030 and the New Urban Agenda, this commentary suggests that by engaging with degrowth, these mainstream policies can potentially provide alternative ecological values as climate responses. In turn, degrowth can also benefit from engaging with the multiple scales and sectors of these institutions for climate and planning practice. However, such multi-scalar engagements demand a repoliticisation of institutional and professional routines, processes and procedures.

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