Paper short abstract:

In this presentation I present ethnographic fieldwork excerpts on the enactment of urban health inequalities in the city of Amsterdam studied through the lens of metabolism by focusing on the metabolic relations between rats, humans and waste infrastructures.

Paper long abstract:

The increasing recognition of the city as a “living environment” (Hinchliffe & Whatmore 2006) or “ecological formation” (Barua & Sinha 2022), suggests a need to study the formation of urban health inequalities in the city beyond a focus on either humans or human-made structures. My project studies the enactment of urban health inequalities in the city of Amsterdam through the lens of metabolism, by focusing on the metabolic relations between rats, humans and waste infrastructures. Rats throughout history have become symbols of disease, disorder and larger community problems, even though they pose no significant health risks for humans today in Amsterdam. They tend to thrive in urban areas with ample dwelling space and food waste making them synanthropic; benefitting from and in human-made environments. Metabolism here figures as an interesting concept to explore the city as a large circulatory organism produced through more-than-human relationality as well as a lens for more-than-human scholars in the broader social sciences studying ‘natural-cultural borderlands’ to emphasize the interdependence and transformatory relations between lively beings and their environments (Kirksey & Helmreich 2010). In my presentation I will present ethnographic fieldwork excerpts on more-than-human relationality in the city through three metabolic urban entry points that link rats, waste and humans together: bread bins, rodenticides and sewage networks.