Governing infectious disease in the urban periphery: marginality, informality and vulnerability

This paper works toward building a theoretical framework to understand the role that extended urbanisation and peripherality played in the COVID-19 pandemic, with a specific focus on conceptualising and analyzing the nature of the social impacts and outbreak responses that unfolded in urban peripheries. In particular, we emphasise how scholarship on socio-spatial peripheralisation—as part of broader approaches devoted to analyzing the nature of extended urbanisation more generally—may vitally inform current discussions about the ways the urban periphery continues to be defined and debated in the wake of the pandemic. We make the case that governance of urban society must accept and respond to the territorial and scalar perforations, multiple diversities and deepening inequities that were highlighted in the pandemic. The chief contribution of this article is that the ways the urban periphery has been defined and debated has been associated with the changing political ecologies of urbanisation. To analytically explore this relationship we deploy and extend relevent concepts like extended urbanisation and suburbanisation, peripherality, marginality, and informality. Our intervention in the distinct but related debates on extended urbanisation and peripheralization adds a further dimension to consider in the governance of disease and cities.