Between the colossal and the catastrophic: Planetary urbanization and the political ecologies of emergent infectious disease

Abstract

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.

Small towns in a metropolitan context. Well-being narratives and quality of life imaginaries as promoters of local intervention

“…Sources: Author adapted from Morgado and Almeida (2022), Basemap, Details, Labels, Human Geography (see Section 6). Over the past decade, while fittingly addressing the generalised condition of urbanisation, it is not uncommon to observe that some authors blur relevant geographical and cultural traits (Brenner and Keil, 2014;Brenner and Ghosh, 2022); often, researchers also blur these while seeking support for their claims.…”

EIDs and the Intersectional Health/Livelihoods Paradox in the Rural Global South

“…Within this frame, the global North has an extractivist relationship with the global South and externalises their consumption-based environmental costs through unequal trade relations. Agrarian restructuring compromises smallholder livelihoods and fragments forests in the interests of export oriented intensive monocropping, commodification and infrastructure development (Brenner & Ghosh, 2022). In this unequal exchange, intensive capitalist agriculture degrades landscapes and undermines local immunity, while labour migration, global commodity circuits and urbanisation increase the spread of infection (Matthewman & Huppatz, 2020).…”

“…In this unequal exchange, intensive capitalist agriculture degrades landscapes and undermines local immunity, while labour migration, global commodity circuits and urbanisation increase the spread of infection (Matthewman & Huppatz, 2020). The 2013-14 ebola virus in Guinea, is an example of structural adjustment-driven economic liberalisation that led to agroecological transformations and the outbreak (Brenner & Ghosh, 2022;Sparke & Anguelov, 2020).…”

“…In their view, urban extension disturbs peripheral ecologies leading to risk i.e., by building on flood-prone land that waterlogs after rainfall, increasing sites where vectors and water-borne diseases grow (Ahmed et al 2019). Similar to Austin (2021), Brenner and Ghosh (2022) explore a dialectical relationship between rural extractivism and urban development that increases risk of EID. A dialectical relationship between expanding enclosure and degradation of land for commercial and industrial agriculture or plantations, at ever greater distances from the concentration of resources into urbanisation is leading to risk.…”

In what sense ruralization?

“…It engages with and extends recent work that has sought, from a range of perspectives, to bring urban studies into closer dialogue with agrarian studies, development studies, and rural sociology often transcending the entrenched urban/rural academic division of labor (e.g. Arboleda, 2016; Ghosh, 2017; Ghosh and Meer, 2021; Gururani, 2020; Paprocki, 2020; see also Balakrishnan, 2019; Brenner and Ghosh, 2022; Cowan, 2018; Gidwani and Ramamurthy, 2018; Harriss-White, 2021; Jacobs, 2018).…”