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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.