Presentation short abstract

This paper examines Delhi’s shifting waste metabolism through political ecology, tracing how transitions from dhalaos to privatised waste infrastructures reconfigure material flows and urban ecologies, displacing waste pickers and exposing deep inequalities in the city’s metabolic order.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines the politics of urban waste in Delhi through the lens of urban metabolism, foregrounding the labour and spatial practices of waste pickers. Waste, far from being a mere by-product of urban life, is central to Delhi’s metabolic processes with its flows of material, labour, and value. The paper traces how recent shifts in waste infrastructure, from decentralised dhalaos (community sorting centres) to privatised Waste-to-Energy plants and Material Recovery Facilities have restructured this metabolism by excluding informal workers from critical nodes of value generation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in waste picker settlements such as Bhalswa and Rangpuri Pahadi, the analysis situates waste work as “infrastructural labour” that maintains urban sustainability while remaining unrecognised and precarious. Through a political-ecological reading, the study explores how caste, gender, and class hierarchies mediate access to waste resources, shaping who is dispossessed and who benefits from urban "development" and “greening” projects. The displacement of waste pickers from dhalaos exemplifies processes of accumulation by dispossession, where public waste is enclosed within private circuits of profit. By conceptualising Delhi’s waste system as a socio-metabolic network, the paper argues that informal workers constitute the city’s hidden infrastructure (both materially and socially) whose erasure undermine ecological and labour justice.

Presentation short abstract

How are waste workers' bodies infrastructured to constitute vital sanitation infrastructures and mediate waste metabolism in Indian cities, and how do technocratic infrastructural transitions delegitimise and devalue the infrastructural labour of waste workers, subjecting them to embodied violence?

Presentation long abstract

Despite being mobilised in constituting vital sanitation infrastructures and reproducing the everyday city, waste workers' bodies remain relatively understudied and disparately theorised in UPE scholarship. Departing from the ontological theorisation of “bodies as infrastructures”, I draw on my ongoing PhD research and argue how waste workers’ bodies are rendered disposable, and are violently “infrastructured”, drawing on casted, classed, and capitalist logics. Approaching caste as a “spatial-sensory-social order”, I highlight ways in which the discursive and material relationalities of both waste and dalit [the "ex-untouchables"] bodies get mediated and manifested through urban infrastructures and metabolic processes, resulting in the abjection of waste workers and their infrastructural labour, subjecting them to epistemic and material dispossession and different forms of embodied harms and infrastructural violence.

Drawing on the multi-sited ethnography of the formalising waste infrastructures in Patna, India, and by doing an “embodied” political ecology of waste, I highlight how the technocratic understandings and transitions of waste infrastructures is experienced at the scale of the body, leaving affective and material inscriptions on the labouring bodies where distinct political subjectivities are formed, and how they are mobilised for contesting and claiming waste, waste work, and waste workspaces by waste workers. Doing that highlights the “heterogeneous infrastructural configurations” through which waste metabolism is made possible in Indian cities, raises critical questions around what kinds of infrastructures are valued and prioritised, and reveals the embedded frictions, embodied violence, and uneven contestations that shape urban infrastructures, metabolic regimes, socio-ecological relations, and broader political ecologies of the city.

Presentation short abstract

In order to demonstrate how mediated networks influence access, inequality, and daily urban metabolisms, this study examines water governance in Karachi's informal settlements using Urban Political Ecology and linking social capital.

Presentation long abstract

In the Global South's fast urbanizing cities, informal settlements are frequently found on the outskirts of state planning, where complex social and political relationships govern access to basic utilities like water. To better understand how water moves through Khawaja Ajmair Nagri, an informal settlement in Karachi, this research examines urban metabolism by emphasizing the linking of social capital—the vertical relationships that connect communities with political brokers, local authorities, and non-state actors. Using the Urban Political Ecology (UPE) framework, the study sees water as a socio-political process influenced by selective inclusion, reliance, and negotiation within disjointed governance structures rather than as a neutral utility.

Using a mixed-methods approach, the study investigates how power is embedded in the social system of service delivery through everyday mediation by peti-leaders, local council members, and informal operators, which results in both access and inequality. The analysis shows a mediated type of governance where linking interactions turn water provision into a realm of everyday politics, as opposed to perceiving informality as the absence of the state.

The study contributes to knowledge of how informal institutions maintain urban life while perpetuating structural injustices by placing these dynamics within UPE's emphasis on power and urban metabolism. It makes the case that understanding and interacting with the mediated networks that really enact infrastructure and citizenship in places like Karachi is necessary for inclusive and resilient water governance.

Presentation short abstract

I draw on the notion of accretion to build on the concept of heterogeneous infrastructure configurations. I examine accretions of waste management in Dakar, Senegal. Accretion defies modernist infrastructure concepts by exposing how multiple agents and configurations manifest and co-exist over time.

Presentation long abstract

Existing scholarly work unpacks infrastructure in the global South as networks of socio-material relations of people and matter. The notion of configurations has been used to challenge the uniformity of modernist infrastructure. I anchor my understanding of configurations in the concept of Heterogenous Infrastructure Configurations (HIC), which grasps how socio-material elements complement and relate to each other by continuously rearranging across space.

Anand proposes the notion of accretion to extend understandings of urban infrastructure. He suggests that infrastructure exceeds modernist design as it manifests across multiple overlapping temporalities. I deploy accretion from an Urban Political Ecology (UPE) perspective to further interrogate how urban infrastructures exceed modernity.

This article examines accretions upheld by formal waste collectors, female street sweeping groups and environmental youth groups in Yarakh, a coastal neighborhood in Dakar, Senegal. By studying these actors, I advance theoretical debates on accretions and configurations in two ways. First, I suggest that accretion can foreground the multiplicity of agents and co-existing configurations of infrastructure upheld across overlapping temporalities. Second, accretion potentially offers an avenue out of sector-bound thinking about configurations.

With a focus on temporal and sectoral non-boundedness, accretion informs a vision that is less linear than modernist concepts of infrastructure. By extending the scope of recognised infrastructural agents, accretion inspires a more just, inclusive perspective on configurations.

Presentation short abstract

This paper explores projects of retrofitting underutilized buildings in São Paulo through the conceptual lens of repair. I explore how these projects carry complex relationships to histories of the modern and how they reflect the complexities of reparative practice in contemporary cities.

Presentation long abstract

This paper explores the historic built environment of the centre of São Paulo as an infrastructural scaffolding for a changing city. Long understood through the lens of abandonment and degradation due to the presence of both extensive homelessness as well as low-income occupation, the centre of São Paulo has resisted state efforts at revitalization for decades. In the contemporary moment, however, a concerted state effort, including an increasingly authoritarian police presence, has dramatically reshaped the centre and seemingly managed to bring in significant new investment. In this paper I explore one component of this process: the retrofitting of historic buildings. Retrofit projects include formal builds that have been implemented by real estate developers who sell a vision of a city marked by mid-century modernist architectural forms, as well as the work of housing movements who occupy and repair empty, often debt-burdened buildings in the service of social housing.

Situating these developments in a longer history of property and politics, this paper explores ongoing projects of retrofitting as examples of reparative practices. Here, reparative practices refer to projects that link forms of material modification with desired social change through attention to the built environment. I consider these projects as examples of the complexities of reparative practice in contemporary cities, and explore how these retrofit projects carry complex relationships to the modern and the modern infrastructural ideal in São Paulo. This paper contributes to ongoing debates about the politics of repair and the possibilities of “reparative infrastructures” in cities of the South.

Presentation short abstract

Urbanisation is treated as a socio-metabolic process centred on construction. The contribution integrates Pineault’s social ecology of capital into UPE to show how institutional architectures and recursive stock–flow dynamics drive escalating material throughput.

Presentation long abstract

This contribution conceptualises urbanisation as a socio-metabolic process, focusing on construction as its operational core. Construction organises labour and material flows into long-lived buildings and infrastructures that mediate socio-ecological relations and bind cities to expanding material throughput. Drawing on London, 1840–2008, the contribution asks how the formation of the construction industry produced the institutional architectures that continue to organise socio-metabolic outcomes, generating ecological harm at planetary scale.

The contribution responds to UPE’s calls to analyse urbanisation-as-process across spatial scales and to (re)centre capital accumulation and the production of urban space, that is, a dialectical approach to the construction industry itself. Urbanisation is, to a large extent, construction work: the organised conversion of circulating into fixed capital that structures extraction, transformation, use and dissipation of materials.

To operationalise this perspective, the contribution introduces Pineault’s social ecology of capital, conceptualising urban metabolism as a recursive dynamic: long-lived stocks organise future flows by locking in obligations of operation, maintenance and replacement. Stock formation under specific institutions converts capital surpluses into mandatory future throughput, while expanding capacities generate push effects via standardisation, valuation and finance. In this view, construction drives escalating material throughput.

Methodologically, the contribution outlines a preliminary framework that treats archival traces as socio-metabolic proxies while remaining open to complementary or alternative approaches. Rather than presenting results, it offers a research design in progress and seeks feedback on how to analyse mechanisms such as standardisation, procurement and leasing regimes, transport-enabled hinterlands, supply-led push effects and long-lived building stocks.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines the corporeal dimension of infrastructural maintenance and repair, a form of labour that plays a central role in mediating metabolic relations.

Presentation long abstract

Human labour is central in mediating metabolic relations. However, its significance is often overlooked in Urban Political Ecology research. This contribution examines the crucial and ongoing work of maintaining networked infrastructures in Hamburg, Germany, which appear extremely stable and are characterised by a high level of technological advancement and digitalised control. Yet despite these technological standards, workers’ embodied skills and sensory expertise underpin the everyday operation of the city’s infrastructures.

Drawing on data collected through extensive archival research, interviews with employees of utility services, and participant observation with maintenance crews, this paper explores the corporeal and affective dimensions of maintenance and repair across sectors and historical periods. Tracing how workers’ bodies and sensory practices – particularly seeing, smelling, and listening – have been entangled with the city’s gas, water, and sanitation infrastructures, the paper demonstrates that these practices continue to play a central role, rendering human labour and workers’ bodies indispensable to the city’s metabolic processes. By centring the corporeality of maintenance, repair, and the bodies that perform these practices, this contribution sheds light on lesser-known aspects of infrastructural reproduction and, potentially, transformation.

Presentation short abstract

In my presentation, I shed light on how sugarcane agribusiness' metabolic arrangements prompted an ongoing extended urbanization process. Through the metaphor of the scattered machine, I sketch the emergence of the networked infrastructures and mechanisms of extraction deriving from that process.

Presentation long abstract

When Columbus introduced sugarcane to the Americas, nobody could have imagined that this plant would one day be processed to fuel millions of Brazilian cars, creating a region three times bigger than Catalunya. Ironically, the processing of sugarcane –biophysically speaking– has not changed. The stalks are washed, crushed, and cooked just the same. What changed were the metabolic arrangements: The plantation evolved into a trans-scalar extraction process driven by agribusiness; the exploitation of workers –both human and non-human– shifted from the body to the region; time synchronized to the demands of consumption rather than reproduction; and entire strips of land were transformed into uninhabitable sacrifice zones, or captured for the sustenance of the business. What was once a local process, product of the Triangular Trade, has turned into a scattered machine whose only purpose is harnessing life to produce sugar.

Today, Brazil is the epicenter of sugarcane. Historically, the country has endorsed a series of policies that have created structural conditions for the business to thrive. What is striking about this is that they embody specific nature-society relations that seek to replicate fossil capitalism in the fields. This occurs through what I call metabolic systems and socio-ecological regimes. By looking at these, I shed light on how sugarcane agribusiness' metabolic arrangements prompted an ongoing extended urbanization process. Through the metaphor of the scattered machine, I sketch the emergence of networked infrastructures as well as particular mechanisms of extraction responsible for the landscapes nobody could have thought of back in 1493.

Presentation short abstract

This paper unpacks the criticality of infrastructural labor in Delhi’s solid waste management and the unequal distribution of environmental harms due to current waste policy. It envisions just infrastructural transitions in southern cities to be predicated on the better organization of this labor.

Presentation long abstract

Municipal strategies to address the waste crisis and modernize Delhi’s solid waste system revolve around technology investments and outsourcing contracts. This paper traces connected transformations at the first-mile collection and last-mile disposal stages of municipal waste management to unpack the reconfiguration of spatial, labor and capital relations around urban waste. Across both, I argue that: (1) caste-ed manual labor remains a critical input in handling waste, and (2) environmental harm from municipal incapacity is borne by all urban residents, but to varying degrees. At the beginning of the waste stream, as primary collection is privatized and increasingly mechanized, informal workers continue to manually collect and consolidate waste. However, these characteristics, being labor-intensive and technology-light, are seen as roadblocks preventing systemic modernization and worker integration. Materially, this allows labor to be incorporated in more precarised arrangements where they bear heavier economic and environmental burdens, while also undercutting material recovery through recycling. These shifts connect to the final stage of waste disposal wherein over-capacity landfills are sought to be replaced by the ready solution of Waste to Energy plants. Here too, research reveals landfills to be ongoing critical sites of waste work and the transfer of toxicity to peripheral waste worker communities. Thus, by deploying an “infrastructural labor” framing across two scales – the neighborhood and the city – the paper highlights the indispensable force that labor provides to infrastructural functioning and the political-ecological imperatives to better organize this for just transitions in southern cities (Stokes & De-Coss Corzo, 2023; Gidwani, 2015).

Presentation short abstract

Storage infrastructures – from jerry cans to grid-scale batteries – shape contemporary urban realities and imaginaries. Exploring water and electricity in Nairobi and beyond, I show how storage reveals multi-scalar relations, infrastructural injustices, and propositional futures beyond the modern.

Presentation long abstract

The ‘modern infrastructure ideal’ has long promised an uninterrupted, universal supply of resources and services. Yet, the limitations of this ideal – whether infrastructural, ecological, or conceptual – have also been well documented. At the same time, our urban worlds have entered a phase in which the certainties and patterns of urban metabolism are reshaped by climate change, technological disruption, and more. Established ways of regulating flows – including their overflows and shortages – through infrastructures are being confronted with new realities, in which, for example, the storage of resources is gaining renewed importance. In their minor and major articulations – as jerry cans or groundwater storage, as power banks or grid-scale batteries – storage infrastructures play an invisibly central role in contemporary infrastructural realities and imaginaries, but they remain peripheral to critical debates about urban metabolisms. Drawing on my PhD research on domestic storage, this contribution explores and contrasts the urban political ecologies of water and electricity supply in Nairobi (Kenya) through the lens of storage, highlighting multi-scalar relations, infrastructural injustices and the ‘tool power’ of storage arrangements. Broadening the scope, I also take a glimpse into planning documents and policies from selected countries/cities in Africa, Asia, and Europe (including Nairobi) to demonstrate how storage (water/energy) has been incorporated into the planning, design and governance of urban worlds, or not. Ultimately, I present storage as a crucial propositional space for urban-infrastructural futures beyond a ‘modern’ ideal, as we re-envision ideals, plans, and projects for more sustainable and just cities.

Presentation short abstract

Cloud computing in cities relies on resource-intensive data centers in climate-vulnerable peripheries. Cases from Germany and Spain illustrate how the digital-material metabolism of public–private infrastructure is depoliticized while it reshapes urban–rural relations.

Presentation long abstract

Big Tech corporations like Amazon and its cloud-computing subsidiary Amazon Web Services (AWS) are increasingly involved in public–private urban infrastructure projects. In May 2024, for example, AWS announced plans to invest in a “European Sovereign Cloud” in the state of Brandenburg, Germany, in cooperation with the German government. Near Berlin, AWS leverages local cluster politics designed to attract Big Tech and position the German capital at the forefront of European cloud developments. In Aragón, Spain, AWS is building the continent’s largest data-technology hub around promises of economic growth and technology-based resilience for urban areas such as Zaragoza.

Our ethnographic research in — and comparative analysis of — these cases shows how cloud computing in cities relies on peripheral data centers that consume large amounts of water and energy in territories already strongly affected by the climate crisis. We analyze the exploitative relation between cloud infrastructure and burdened, processing peripheries as a front-end/back-end configuration, resembling software/hardware architectures in the ever-present computing of modern urbanism. By following interrelated flows of local urban politics and water, we examine (I) how public data, environmental and social responsibilities are privatized and depoliticized through techno-solutionist, convenience-based imaginaries, and (II) how exchanges of flows and digital outputs reshape political-economic and socio-ecological urban-rural relations. Drawing on Urban Political Ecology and Science and Technology Studies, we critically conceptualize the digital-material metabolism of “cloud-city” urbanism and shed light on the environments and resistance of communities in its shadows.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines how rainwater harvesting in Mexico City is reshaping infrastructural dependencies and political relations. We analyse how heterogeneous configurations can move beyond amelioration to open radical possibilities for water provision, agency and infrastructural politics.

Presentation long abstract

While urban political ecologists have long studied the fragmentation of infrastructures and the significance of non-modern infrastructure in the Global South, the potential of new kinds of infrastructure – and their politics – remains largely unexplored. On the other hand, transition studies – primarily focused on Global North contexts – often assume that innovations replace existing infrastructure. However, Southern urban innovations are often developed and disseminated to complement existing but inadequate infrastructure, resulting in heterogeneous infrastructure configurations.

Drawing on interviews with rainwater-harvesting (RWH) adopters and institutional actors in Mexico City, this paper interrogates whether, and under what conditions, heterogeneous infrastructures might open possibilities beyond mere amelioration. Rather than treating RWH as a technology of autonomy, we argue that it reconfigures relations of dependency by enabling households to navigate between infrastructures, political actors, and the environment. We also examine persistent exclusions at the urban periphery, demonstrating that the political potential of heterogeneity cannot be read off the technology alone but is continually shaped by state-citizenship relations.

Overall, we provide a non-teleological analysis of infrastructural heterogeneity that foregrounds its radical potential: enabling households to mitigate the risks of monolithic dependence, cultivate plural infrastructural relations, and expand the political imagination around just and sustainable urban water provision. Ultimately, we argue that heterogeneous configurations such as RWH do not guarantee transformation but can, under specific sociopolitical arrangements, reorient agency, reduce vulnerability, and open new terrains for infrastructural politics.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines how heterogeneous infrastructures shape urban metabolism and socioenvironmental inequalities in the Favela do Sapé. Comparing works along the Sapé river, it shows that infrastructure is not neutral but unevenly produced socionature.

Presentation long abstract

Drawing on Urban Political Ecology, this paper examines how heterogeneous infrastructural configurations shape urban metabolism and produce socioenvironmental inequalities in the Favela do Sapé, São Paulo. Considering infrastructure as a central mediator of socioecological relations, we analyze how interventions funded by the Growth Acceleration Program, despite significant investments in slums upgrading, reconfigured flows, uses, and practices, generating both punctual improvements and processes of displacement and re-precarization through reoccupation. The study shows that slums upgrading is permeated by power relations, divergent interests, and complex arrangements among public agents, technical actors, armed groups, and residents. These dynamics configure an urban metabolism marked by contradictions and disputes. By comparing works inside and outside the favela along the Sapé river, we demonstrate that infrastructure does not function as a neutral network but as socionature produced unevenly. The mismatch between federal financing logics and the territorial dynamics of the slum contributed to environmental injustices, underscoring the need for more democratic decision-making from the project design stage and for continued state presence after urbanization. Social mobilization and community organization emerge as fundamental to metabolic mediation and to contesting the meanings of urban intervention. Exploring the intersection between urban metabolism and infrastructure, we argue that a dialectical approach reveals who benefits, who is harmed, and which policies arise from different infrastructural configurations. We contend that a just and sustainable infrastructure requires shared responsibility between the state and residents, attention to actions that prevent reoccupation, and a new political orientation capable of producing more equitable urban socionatures.

Presentation short abstract

In Mathare, Nairobi, water tanks are political currency as politicians gift them to youths in the guise of empowerment for support. This paper examines how clientelist politics drives the hybridisation and fragmentation of water infrastructure and metabolic flows.

Presentation long abstract

In Nairobi's Mathare informal settlement, water tanks have emerged as critical political infrastructure that mediates both patron-client relations and urban water metabolism. Drawing on qualitative social network analysis, field observations, and in-depth interviews, this paper examines how politicians, from local assembly members to parliamentary aspirants and even the President, deploy water tanks to consolidate youth support by mobilising youth groups through entrepreneurship and economic empowerment discourses.

In Nairobi's informal settlements, characterised by enduring inequality and multiple forms of state neglect and deprivation, water tanks are increasingly serving as a form of political currency in patron-client exchanges. Politicians strategically engage youth groups heavily involved in water provision (both legal and illegal), framing infrastructure gifts as enduring symbols of public service. Meanwhile, the state exercises strategic forbearance towards informal water activities, selectively tolerating them to secure political allegiances.

I argue that water tanks, legitimised through decades of youth unemployment and economic empowerment policy discourses, further fragment and hybridise Mathare's metabolic flows while simultaneously reshaping the settlement's governance dynamics. The analysis demonstrates that urban informality operates as both a site of marginalisation and a resource for political control.

Contributing to urban political ecology debates on heterogeneous infrastructure configurations, this research traces the social and political networks mobilised through water tanks as both symbolic and material resources. By examining how political discourse mediates metabolic relations, the paper offers new insights into the governance of essential services and illuminates the distinctive politics of infrastructure in informal settlements.