The Metropolis and Metabolic Life

Abstract

What does it mean to invoke metabolism for specifying an ‘urban’ animal and also for engaging urbanicity more broadly? Cities are sites of material densification. They shore up commodities from the world-over and generate effluents that produce new, industrial ecologies. Urban dwelling fosters metabolic proximities that override the assumed detachment marking metropolitan life. Borders quarantining the human from other-than-human worlds become untenable, and a visceral politics of the city fractured along highly uneven social fault lines comes to the fore. The movements of animals, feed and waste stretch cities in all kinds of directions, creating spatial intimacies that are not just in here but out there, calling for attention to processes of urbanization within and beyond the city.