As part of a critical ‘dialogue’ around the ontological nature of more-than-human well-being in an ecological emergency, I am interested in putting Amanda Yates, Kelly Dombroski, and Rita Dionisio's work into conversation with Matthew Gandy's book Natura Urbana. Whilst they are very different projects in their cultural focus and ambition, they lean into each other as part of a broader imaginary of ecological constellations and urban collectives.

In response to Carr's article, ‘Repair and care: Locating the work of climate crisis’, I explore how repair labour demonstrates the importance of skilled, hands-on labour for responding to times of breakdown and change. Like scholarship on apprenticeship and practical enskilment, repair work demonstrates how labour entails working with the material world and other workers, and hands-on engagement with complex and changing systems. Instead of approaching labour and environmental concerns as separate and often antagonistic, I believe attending to the embodied and relational nature of labour may provide insight on how to work towards a more just socio-environmental future.

While the compact city has become a major element for sustainable urban development and one of the most controversially discussed issues in contemporary urban studies, I argue that compactness has been a central element of various models of urban development for over 100 years. When we talk about a ‘renewed agenda’ for the compact city, we need to consider how historic settlement patterns, shaped by specific socio-historical conditions and ideas of compactness are re-structured through the contemporary conception of the compact city. My main argument is that the compact city in its current conception is mainly treating symptoms of unsustainable urban development but does not go deep enough to change existing patterns of uneven social geographies. By integrating the compact city with Henri Lefebvre’s conception of centrality I discuss four socio–material relations to demonstrate how centrality affects the social unevenness of spatial development and can lead us towards an understanding of compact cities as multi-scalar fields of relations today.

The article ‘What is “affective infrastructure”?’ sought to historicize and rework a concept in geographical and philosophical thought. In doing so, it aimed to understand how scholars use the notion of ‘affective infrastructure’ to clarify the specific (but also rather diverse) relationships among spaces or worlds or ideas to which it was applied. The article also offered my own wagers: that in grasping at infrastructure today, scholars are sometimes implicitly missing – or explicitly disavowing – some of the historical-materialist and partisan origins and potential uses of the concept in continental theory, but also revolutionary movement analysis. Five reviews by six readers disaggregate my attempts to clarify and synthesize the stakes of this concept. This commentary responds to each of these generous accounts and reflects on the mediating work and stakes of conceptual genealogies, inventions, and rehabilitations.

We offer this commentary in response to Bosworth's exploration of what affective infrastructures gather materially and sustain politically. We focus on the task of locating affective infrastructure, as Bosworth's generative piece invites, specifically tracing how uneven affective relationships to infrastructure impact marginalized communities. Here, we consider how an approach of attending to labour, repair, and care may connect disparate accounts of infrastructure and offer the potential for just futures.

In this short response, we engage with four generous and stimulating commentaries on our Planetary Social Thought (2021). We endorse Cecilia Åsberg's suggestion that the boundary between the environmental humanities and social sciences is dissolving – but also call for more inventive relations between these disciplines and the natural sciences. We discuss László Cseke's account of the rise of factory-farmed ‘broiler’ chickens as a reversal of many of the achievements of the Earth over the last half-billion years. We agree with Franklin Ginn's suggestion that vegetality is a crucial vector of planetary self-exploration and invention – and one that can give us clues as to what life might become on other worlds. We reflect on Simon Dalby's observations about the lack of reference to planetary governance in the book, suggesting that we need a way of thinking about the politics of the Earth that goes beyond conflict and agonism – in Åsberg's words, that we need to learn not just to survive but to thrive.

Glitch epistemologies for computational cities provide a useful and important extension of the previous work of Elwood and Leszczynski, decentring the usual suspects that are the focus for (digital) urban critique (e.g. ‘smart cities’, ‘platforms’) by drawing on queer theory and illustrating what this might bring to approaching cities. It is this topic that this commentary will address, first by discussing what is meant by such a queer approach to the urban with glitch epistemologies, and second by considering how this approach can pose questions concerning the temporalities of urban change.

This commentary responds to Chantel Carr's ‘Repair and care’ through a focus on the vexed question of carbon-intensive worker retraining in the context of urgent and necessary decarbonisation and industry change in Australia. There are many parallels between my research and Carr's, particularly in relation to an understanding of the potential of existing technical skillsets in industrial working populations. Like Carr, I reflect upon my empirical research – over the past decade – with current and former industrial tradespeople. This commentary reflects on what ‘retraining’ has actually meant, in practice, for industrial workers in deindustrialising Australia. I then identify a key tension that exists in relation to the question of retraining carbon workers. Climate change mitigation calls for the dramatic and wide-ranging transformation of industries, infrastructure, jobs, and skillsets. But the fact remains, humans are complex, with diverse needs, and they are now more likely to articulate these needs on an individual level, not collectively. With this in mind – and in a background in which much academic work draws attention to complexities and institutional shortcomings – how do we balance individualised requirements with the need for dramatic, macro-level transformation?