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.