The question of urbanisation ‘beyond the city’ has generated a lively debate in the fields of urban studies and geography in recent years. This paper brings a key concept from this discussion –‘extended urbanisation’– in conversation with distinct yet related concepts from critical agrarian studies. We briefly review the ‘classic’ agrarian question in order to situate contemporary agrarian questions within the historical geographies of capitalist restructuring since the late-nineteenth century. We then examine a selection of contemporary agrarian scholarship attuned to the interconnectedness of agrarian and urban sociospatial relations to argue that the concept of extended urbanisation and urban studies more generally have much to gain from a closer engagement with this work. To this end, we identify three openings for further analysis: (1) ‘global depeasantisation’ and ‘deruralisation’ as the labour dimensions of extended urbanisation; (2) the co-existence of banal ‘operational landscapes’ with landscapes of high-intensity extraction and agro-industrialisation; and (3) relational periodisations of urbanisation that incorporate successive world-historical ‘food regimes’ and their associated commodity frontiers in order to unearth geohistories of extended urbanisation in colonial and postcolonial contexts. We conclude by rearticulating the ‘right to the city’ in terms of a broader ‘right to space’ as a means of re-centring ongoing struggles against capitalist urbanisation in spaces beyond the city.

Against the backdrop of contemporary debates on the transcendence of city-centric epistemologies in urban theory, this article proposes a theoretical framework for exploring the connections between processes of planetary urbanization and the political ecologies of emergent infectious disease. Following a brief overview of research on cities and the coronavirus pandemic, we elaborate a critical interrogation and heterodox synthesis of two distinct lines of investigation—(1) research by Roger Keil and his collaborators on the embeddedness of emergent infectious diseases within processes of extended urbanization and (2) work by radical epidemiologist Rob Wallace and his colleagues, which productively situates emergent infectious diseases in relation to the geographies and political ecologies of agribusiness under neoliberalizing capitalism. We direct attention to the ways in which processes of planetary urbanization are remaking the human and nonhuman geographies of non-city spaces, causing infectious pathogens to be unmoored from previously localized ecosystems and catapulted into broader territories of circulation. This line of analysis requires rigorous application of dialectical methods that can illuminate the internal relations through which cities dynamically co-evolve and co-transform with the non-city spaces, more-than-human territories, and multispecies political ecologies that support their metabolic operations, including at the microbiological scale of novel pathogens. The elaboration of such an approach yields an interpretation of the urbanization/emergent infectious disease nexus as a medium and expression of the agro-ecological crisis tendencies of neoliberal capitalism. A concluding section outlines three emergent arenas of agro-industrial transformation in which processes of extended urbanization have created new spatial configurations and infrastructural pathways for the production and proliferation of emergent infectious diseases.

This commentary offers an analysis of Gillen et al.’s (2022) ‘Geographies of ruralization’. Through a reading of the authors’ conceptualization of ‘in-situ’ and ‘extended’ ruralization, I raise two sets of questions. The first pertains to the relationship between ruralization – which the authors conceptualize primarily in terms of rural social reproduction – and transformations in agricultural production and agrarian political economy under contemporary capitalism. The second invites the authors to further elaborate on the historical specificity of the concept of ruralization, the politico-epistemological standpoint of their conceptualization, and the theoretical framework within which the concept is embedded.