This second of three review articles on the uneven geographies of COVID-19 examines geographical research on (1) spatial patterns of the pandemic's unfolding and (2) its uneven economic geographies, considering both its direct and indirect impacts-for example, those resulting from related preventive measures. In line with this article series, it (3) concludes by discussing the relevance of the reviewed research for the syndemics approach and vice versa. Research on economic effects analyzes disruptions to global value chains, industries, labor systems, and workspaces, particularly remote work. Some studies explore how the pandemic coincided with ongoing economic transitions such as economic restructuring and shrinkage, austerity politics, digitization, and automation. Studies highlight the need to contextualize spatial inequalities within historical political-economic interdependencies, power asymmetries, and structural disparities. In doing so, geographical studies add depth to syndemic analyses of structural vulnerabilities and crisis cascades, highlighting the need for spatially sensitive assessments. Still, diverging findings at national, regional, and local levels call for comparative ex-post analyses and relational methodologies able to unpack syndemic complexities. In turn, geographers can benefit from syndemic scholars' insights into disease burdens and pre-existing structural health impacts.

Building upon a review of geographic research agendas and concepts related to the uneven geographies of COVID-19, this first of three articles debates the benefits of geographic analyses to the syndemic approach and, vice versa, of a syndemics perspective to geographic analyses. The syndemics perspective was proposed by critical medical anthropologists. It seeks to deepen the understanding of the structural dimensions and processes that lead to the convergence and cascading of multiple epidemics in specific population groups. Geographers have also highlighted the intersections of multiple health or other crises during COVID-19, when the pandemic and global health emergency coincided with and escalated existing structural inequalities produced by the climate crisis, environmental degradation, political conflicts and war, socio-economic disparities and poverty, social divisions, racism, hatred and violence, mental health problems and stress. Geographers have mobilized concepts such as scale, territory, borders and intersectionality to unravel the uneven unfolding and consequences of the global health emergency for diverse population groups. We therefore argue that geography has a lot to contribute to the understanding of the spatial and contextual dimensions of COVID-19 as a pandemic as well as a syndemic - but it has so far not actively employed the latter concept's analytical lens. Mobilizing the syndemics approach can contribute to more comprehensive accounts of the structural dimensions and processes that continue and cascade in pandemics.

The special issue Abject Lives brings together five articles that attend to questioning the processes that render nonhumans as “abject others” (Kristeva, 1982), devoid of value and amenable to elimination and killing. By doing so, it centres animals and other nonhumans that rarely become subject to positive valuations or human sympathy, such as slurry, wolves, geese and other species that are classified as ‘invasive’ or as a ‘health threat’. Drawing on empirical case studies from Australia and Germany, each of the articles demonstrates how processes of abjection intersect with practices of state-making, governing and power; practices that extend towards nonhumans and that often work towards their violent erasure. In the introduction to the special issue, we review how the articles build from and contribute to a growing interest in more-than-human approaches within the subdiscipline of political geography.

Focusing on the recent transformation of urban food markets in the UK, this paper applies a practice theory perspective to analyse the social practices involved in the making and doing of urban food markets. Based on fieldwork in Barnsley and Sheffield, we identify three sets of interrelated practices that are involved in the transformation of urban markets: economic diversification, traditionalisation, and technological innovation. We describe these practices as socio‐material in the sense that they involve the practices of buying and selling, and other forms of social interaction, combined with the foodstuffs, infrastructure, and other material things that together constitute the contemporary marketplace. The evidence presented in this paper challenges prevalent dichotomised ways of thinking about market transformation in terms of inclusion and exclusion or modernity and tradition.

Viren kennen keine Grenzen. Von Grenzschliesungen im Pandemiefall rat auch die WHO ab, da sie im Zweifel eher schaden. Dennoch sind Grenzschliesungen und -kontrollen in der aktuellen Pandemie eher die Regel. Das konnte auch an popularen kartografischen Darstellungen liegen, die eine gesundheitspolitische Orientierung an Grenzen nahelegen.

In Germany, large residential housing estates built during the 1950s to 1980s have become important areas for migrants and refugees. In Eastern Germany, estates from the socialist era have lost many of their inhabitants following the reunification in 1990. Some, like those in the city of Halle (Saale), have lost more than half of their population. This downward trend has stopped now and in some areas, population size grows. For Halle (Saale), we computed the in and out-migration of large socialist housing estates from 2011 to 2018 and compared it to the late 19th century parts of the inner city which are now well-sought after residential areas. We find that German residents have left in great numbersthe estates. At the same time, migrants have moved in even greater numbers to the estates. Most of them did not come from the parts of the inner city, suggesting that displacement through gentrification has not (yet) been the decisive factor for ethnic segregation. However, some migrant households are now, most recently, moving away from the estates as well and towards the city centre. This suggests that ethnic segregation is now being superseded by social segregation.

The concept of riskscapes has so far not embraced the concept of scale in any deeper sense. A conceptual integration of scale is needed, however, when dealing with the diversity of risks involved in opposing economic and environmental rationalities. Drawing on research conducted in a German coal-mining area, the article shows how the risk of regional economic decline and the risk of global climate change are pitted against each other. The article explores this ‘politics of scaling’ that lead to a reconfiguration of the coal riskscape, including a tentative step towards decarbonising German energy production.

The dashboard is the most striking cultural artefact of the current coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic. It reveals the fraught pandemic politics which are centred around territorial approaches on the scale of the state rather than international cooperation, democratic liberation, and local care. The dashboard is a biopolitical technology of anxiety, prompting national states of emergency. This narrow approach to framing the COVID-19 crisis is rooted in military-style pandemic preparedness planning that became fashionable in the 21st century. However, there is mounting evidence that this approach does not adequately address the uneven and unjust geographies of the present.

This chapter traces the historical growth of consumer demand for various types of convenience food, acknowledging the significance of earlier forms of bottled, pickled and canned food but focusing on the period beginning in the 1950s with the development of the frozen TV dinner in the United States and contemporary European examples (including frozen, chilled and ambient products, branded and own-label). It discusses the variable market penetration of convenience food across Europe and examines the role of technological change including innovations in industrial food processing (such as the ‘cold chain’) and domestic technologies (such as refrigeration, home freezing and microwave cooking). The chapter also considers the role of supermarkets in shaping the routines of car-borne food shopping and changing gender relations and household structures (including the effects of increased female participation in the labour force and the growth of single-person households). The chapter ends with a more detailed account of the development of convenience food in the UK, Denmark, Germany and Sweden.