Urban metabolism redux

Abstract

Metabolic readings of urban space point in at least four different analytical directions: the organicist emphasis on cities and their agricultural hinterlands; the diagrammatic city of modelling and trophic imaginaries, extending to interest in material flow analysis, industrial metabolism, and neo-Luhmannian conceptions of socio-metabolic transitions; the neo-Marxian concern with metabolic rift and evolving intersections between capital, the human body, and a variety of material infrastructures; and the more recent interest in metabolic densities, occluded pathways, and multispecies metabolic entanglements. I suggest that an alternative conceptual synthesis might allow for a more embodied, multi-subjectival, and historically situated reading of urban metabolism.