Contribution short abstract

I will talk about how to think about the metabolism concept from the vantage point of a critical theory of nature. I will highlight the contribution of Alfred Schmidt and stress how he helps us ground Frankfurt School critical theory in ecology.

Contribution long abstract

I will talk about how to think about the metabolism concept from the vantage point of a critical theory of nature (based on my book Toward a Critical Theory of Nature and the article "Eco-Marxism and the critical theory of nature: two perspectives on ecology and dialectics"). I will highlight the contribution of Alfred Schmidt and stress how he helps us ground Frankfurt School critical theory in ecology. The result is a distinctive approach to ecology that differs both from influential strands of eco-Marxism and from new materialism.

Contribution short abstract

Social-ecological transformation involves restructuring and reducing the social metabolism, but this process is highly contested. Bridging socio-metabolic and political ecology research, this contribution introduces a typology of socio-ecological transformation conflicts.

Contribution long abstract

From a socio-ecological perspective, transformation refers to both a qualitative restructuring and a quantitative reduction of social metabolism, but this transformation is highly – and increasingly – contested. Socio-metabolic research has so far argued that an increasing social metabolism also leads to more conflicts. The EJOLT Atlas, for example, has linked “ecological distribution conflicts” to increases in socio-metabolic processes around the world. Political ecology, in turn, has emphasized the political-economic structures as well as the discursive or onto-epistemic relations in which transformation pathways and respective conflicts unfold but lacks more detailed references to biophysical and socio-metabolic processes. This contribution builds on social metabolism and political ecology research to propose a typology of socio-ecological transformation conflicts that captures both the socio-metabolic dimension and the transformation dimension of such conflicts. This helps a) to better understand both the productive and obstructive role of conflicts and b) carve out the potentials and barriers for transformative change. From such a perspective, contemporary transformation processes are especially contested because they are not only about the introduction of new technologies, infrastructure or sectors (i.e., an increasing social metabolism) but at the same time about the phase-out and termination of fossil fuels and environmentally destructive resource use, technology and sectors (i.e., the reduction and qualitative transformation of the social metabolism).

Contribution short abstract

Summary comments will be made on how the problem of external nature has motivated different metabolism concepts. Further, it will be considered how each usage addresses (or does not address) the limitlessness of capital's social metabolism.

Contribution long abstract

Metabolism is a plural concept. It has been deployed across a variety of disciplines to describe some aspect or other of 'our' relation to 'nature'--with both 'our' and 'nature' being terms problematized in the very deployment of the concept. Yet despite its plural meanings, the metabolism concept has thus consistently been used to address the problem of external nature. In political ecology, for instance, 'metabolism' is invoked to critique society-nature dualism: there is no society and (external) nature; there are only socionatures. In the concept's development within industrial ecology and eco-Marxism, on the other hand, external nature is treated as a necessary precondition for critical and normative judgment. In order to evaluate the ecological impact of industrial capitalism, in other words, it is necessary to at least analytically separate capital's social metabolism from human and non-human natures. While we ultimately sympathize more with this gesture toward external nature than the double internality (i.e., society-in-nature and nature-in-society) of political ecology's metabolism concept, we suggest further that a negative and planetary perspective on external nature is necessary to adequately address the crises inherent to the limitless drive of capital accumulation. Put another way, it is precisely because capital's social metabolism fails to reconstruct socionatural worlds into a smooth, homogenous globe that we are forced to confront the critical-materialist question of our being planetary.

Contribution short abstract

Metabolism describes a relation between living beings and their environments; social freedom concerns a relation between human beings within the context of an institutionally ordered social world. Our talk asks: How might these two concepts be fruitfully brought together in social theorizing?

Contribution long abstract

Metabolism describes a relation and process between living beings and their environments; social freedom concerns a relation between human beings within the context of an institutionally ordered social world. Our talk asks: How might these two concepts be fruitfully brought together in social theorizing? Can social freedom be understood beyond an anthropocentric context, such that the human relation to nature is an essential aspect of realizing social freedom? Drawing on some earlier insights from both German philosophy and critical theory, we propose that social theorizing in the 21st century must understand social freedom and metabolism as essentially intertwined. A starting point for understanding this intertwinement is the labor process, which, we argue, is the materialist basis for social freedom.

Contribution short abstract

We identify a lack of attention to labour within metabolic research. Based on Urban Political Ecology, we argue that labour plays a central role in all metabolic processes and their transformation, and that it provides a productive entry point for dialogue across different approaches to metabolism.

Contribution long abstract

In Marx’ concept of social metabolism, human labour is crucial in its role of transforming nature into consumable products within a specific mode of production and, hence, mediating the dialectical metabolic relationship between nature and human beings. Accordingly, labour is at the centre of Marxist considerations of appropriating, democratizing and transforming metabolic relations. Despite the important role of urban metabolism in Urban Political Ecology (UPE) and the preoccupation with its politicization and democratization, there is, however, a considerable lack of scientific work concerned with this role of human labour.

Our contribution calls for human labour – comprising infrastructural and reproductive labour, as well as political (disruptive) work – to be brought to the fore as a central object of analysis in UPE. Departing from infrastructure studies and energy geography, we transfer the recently grown interest in human labour within these fields to the perspective of UPE. Engaging with human labour in its role of, first, maintaining and repairing infrastructure and, second, transforming urban energy metabolisms, we argue for the consideration of labour as a crucial analytical concept in the quest for more just and democratic metabolisms in times of crises and transformation. Recognising the relevance of labour also creates an opportunity to engage with its explicit, implicit, or even absent consideration in other frameworks, thereby providing a basis for fruitful conversations across diverse approaches to metabolism.

Contribution short abstract

As urban political ecology analyses remain largely qualitative, we present a quantitative approach to analyse material flows from infrastructural landscapes to agglomerated urban areas that may help locate the infrastructural landscapes where environmental burdens are externalised.

Contribution long abstract

Urban political ecology has highlighted the fundamental dependence of agglomerated urban areas on the continuous flow of materials and energy from infrastructral landscapes to construction sites. As a result, relevant qualitative case study investigations on construction materials such as cement, concrete, wood or steel, as well as on water, food and energy supply chains, have portrayed material and power conflicts along such flows. Yet, the study of urban metabolism from an urban political perspective remains remains largely qualitative. To expand such research focus into geospatial science, this presentation aims to render the first insights from the application of industrial ecology methods, namely trade-linked material flow analysis, to the study of urban metabolism’s flows beyond cities. To do so, it will present the results of ongoing research on the demand and supply of wood for construction in Germany, including the location of the wood outsourced for construction within the global supply of timber into Germany, as well as the location of the infrastructural landscapes that, indeed, outsource the environmental burdens of timber production outside Germany.

De Castro Mazarro, Alejandro; Joshi, Neelakshi; Samartzidis, Lasare (2024) Disrupting comfort: From low-carbon to low-impact cities. In: Spatial Research and Planning 82:4https://doi.org/10.14512rur.2567

De Castro Mazarro, Alejandro; George Kaliaden, Ritu; Wende, Wolfgang; Egermann, Markus (2023) Beyond urban ecomodernism: How can degrowth-aligned spatial practices enhance urban sustainability transformations. In: Urban Studies 60:7. https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980221148107

Heynen, Nik; Kaika, Maria; Swyngedouw, Erik (2006) In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism. Taylor & Francis

Contribution short abstract

Social metabolism research often neglects labour, leading to limited or promethean explanations of ecological transitions. In contrast, I link social metabolism to wage–labour nexus, showing how this symbiotic relation mediates society’s produciton-absorption nexus and thus socioeconomic viability.

Contribution long abstract

Although early social-metabolism scholarship engaged with questions of labour, the field has increasingly shifted toward material-flow accounting, including major efforts to harmonize measurements internationally and to analyse global flows. However, human labour - understood in its simplest form as the use of energy to satisfy human needs - has not been systematically related to the concept of social metabolism. In some cases, long-term studies of material flows link sociometabolic transitions to factors such as new energy carriers, structural changes, globalization, regulatory modes, and economic systems. However, these explanations remain at a superficial level, as most studies focus in quantitatively describing material flows without connections to socioecological and political economy theories of historical dynamics. As a result, the links between political-economic processes and sociometabolic regimes remain underexplored.

In turn, I survey socioecological theories and find four factors explaining sociometabolic change mainly focusing on technical aspects of production instead of labour relations: resource-efficient technological change, tertiarization, internationalisation, and market saturation. While material stocks and flows can reflect these factors, I argue that they are embedded in capitalist social relations, particularly in the historical evolution of wage labour. Building on Mészáros' (1995) notion of social metabolism and in line with ecological revisions of Regulation Theory, I contend that the wage–labour nexus - seen through the organization of (re)productive work and (pre)distributive labour institutions - mediates the continuous exchange of materials between society’s productive structures and its environment. In developing this framework, I contribute to social metabolism research by foregrounding its political-economic dimensions.

Contribution short abstract

Can we identify cancerous dynamics in the genesis and evolution of capitalism? This presentation revisits and expands the “cancer hypothesis” advanced by John McMurtry (1999) and Joel Kovel (2002), examining both the hypothesis and its broader implications from a sociometabolic perspective.

Contribution long abstract

This presentation revisits and expands the “cancer hypothesis” suggested by John McMurtry in The Cancer Stage of Capitalism (1999) and Joel Kovel in The Enemy of Nature (2002), situating it within a historical analysis of the genesis and evolution of capitalist social metabolisms. The oncological hypothesis posits that capitalism’s compulsive orientation toward unlimited growth displays dynamics analogous to malignant processes within the Earth system. Assessing this proposition requires a shift from the exclusive study of material and energy flows toward an examination of the socio-cellular forms that organise and propel the reproduction of capital. From this standpoint, the concept of social metabolism is shown to require expansion through a “social physiology” capable of analysing the cooperative, proliferative, and differentiating cellular forms characteristic of each historical configuration of metabolism. This perspective not only clarifies the pathogenic character of capitalist growth but also deepens key elements of Marx’s metabolic theory as reconstructed by Kohei Saito (2017), particularly the need to analyse how forms of social cooperation become historically reconfigured under capitalist metabolic domination. In doing so, it offers a more precise account of how capitalist accumulation transforms the cooperative tissues that sustain collective life, generating systemic dysfunctions at planetary scale.

Contribution short abstract

Unravelling metabolic inequalities and ecological asymmetries emerging from the greening of the built environment within/among human and non-human habitats is a critical frontier in urban metabolism studies. It can foster novel (re)configurations across intellectual traditions in metabolic research.

Contribution long abstract

The extractivist nature of the fabrication of climate-change adaptive ‘metropolitan nature’ that benefits only wealthier populations has been a recurrent trope in neo-Marxian interpretations of urban metabolism. In political ecology, less attention has been paid to the broader biological context in which social-ecological inequalities occur and to the predatory dynamics of dispossession that ‘nature-based’ interventions engender vis-à-vis multispecies forms of life. In parallel, although assessing the contribution of ‘green areas’ to the fulfilment or mitigation of cities’ material requirements has been welcomed as a valuable expansion of social ecology’s metabolic methods, these assessments predominantly endorse an anthropocentric perspective, with little consideration of other-than-human denizens’ metabolic needs.

Drawing on degrowth scholarship on ‘de-resourcification’ practices, I argue the need for a novel conceptual and operational paradigm bridging the social ecology’s framing of urban metabolism with landscape-ecology multispecies perspectives and the mapping of ecological unequal exchanges within urban regions. In world-systems informed environmental sociology, ‘Ecological Unequal Exchange’ refers to the occurring of global inequalities in natural resources transfer and environmental load displacement among national economies. I propose to expand the world-systems approach by applying it to the analysis of the metabolic inequalities and ecological asymmetries occurring between ‘autocentric’ ‘nature-based’ construction sites and human and nonhuman ‘peripheral’ habitats. Building on this expanded world-systems approach, I discuss a novel framing of socio-metabolic research tailored to the mapping of persistent and novel iterations of the Metabolic Imperialism driven by material, energy, waste, and labour exchanges between diverse communities and among human-dominated and other-than-human habitats in cities.

Contribution short abstract

This paper explores how social metabolism operates as a technology of power that deliberately reorganizes territories for surplus extraction. Using El Salto, Mexico as a case, it connects Latin American and Marxist perspectives to reveal the political nature of metabolic disruption.

Contribution long abstract

The usefulness of social metabolism theory has largely focused on theoretical discussions about its ability to describe the material and energetic dimensions of different urban, industrial, or socio-ecological systems. However, we propose that its utility goes beyond its descriptive power, having an explanatory capacity for territorial processes. Building on the Hispanic-American approaches of González de Molina, Toledo, and Martínez-Alier, it is possible to integrate tangible and intangible elements into the understanding of social metabolism, which allows for a more precise comprehension of the territory. The territory is conceived as a complex system in which material, energetic, political, and cultural elements are ordered under several deliberately established purposes. Thus, social metabolism provides the necessary evidence not only to describe what is happening in the territory but also to understand how such order has been produced. This work seeks to contribute to the dialogue between Latin American perspectives on social metabolism and Marxist or European approaches to the “metabolic rift,” showing how both converge in analyzing deliberate territorial transformations. Based on this conceptualization, and through Haberl’s methodological approach and environmental history tools, we have described and demonstrated the processes of territorial sacrifice in El Salto, Jalisco, Mexico—one of the country’s main environmental hellscapes. We show that the extreme externalization of environmental and social costs necessary to sustain surplus extraction has been deliberate and is expressed in environmental impacts, social degradation, and urban-industrial reordering. These processes, particularly in the Global South, have been shaped by Northern dynamics often in complicity with national hegemonies.