Urbanization in the Planetary Metabolism of Capital

This lecture is sponsored and organized by The Institute for Comparative Modernities' reading group Geographies of Capital and by AAP's History of Architecture and Urbanism Society (HAUS) through Graduate and Professional Student Assembly Finance Committee funds.

Abstract

This presentation elaborates a framework of analysis for the study of capitalist urbanization under geohistorical conditions in which (a) a fossil-based metabolic regime dominates the operations of capital and (b) climate and nature emergencies are proliferating and intensifying across the planet. The arguments are developed at length in a forthcoming book project (co-authored with Swarnabh Ghosh, Harvard University), A Metabolic Monstrosity: Capitalist Urbanization in the Shatter Zone. This book argues for an approach to urban theory that is adequate for an epoch in which the planetary biosphere is being systematically degraded and destroyed through the cumulative impacts of capital's voraciously carbon-intensive pursuit of exponentially cumulative growth. We argue that this conjuncture of proliferating environmental emergencies and entrenched climate coloniality (Sultana 2022; Táíwò 2021) requires us to transcend city-centric approaches to the urban question in favor of dialectical frameworks of analysis that center city/non-city relations—and their multiscalar metabolic dimensions—at the heart of our theoretical and practical concerns. Against this background, we explore the interplay between the capitalist form of urbanization and the fossil-based metabolic regime of capital that was consolidated in the 1870s and continues to structure imperial relations and socioenvironmental dynamics in the early twenty-first century. Against approaches that narrow this problematique to the role of fossil fuels in powering industrial agglomeration economies, we consider the complex metabolic relays that articulate the latter to several other key arenas that have been profoundly reshaped under the fossil-based metabolic regime of capital—including extraction, industrial agriculture, logistics, and waste. Taken together, these intermeshed metabolic relays engender a "deadly symbiosis" that drastically escalates capital's drive towards the intensification of metabolic throughput. 

In addition to accelerating the aggregate turnover time of capitalist production and circulation, the rate and volume of biogeophysical appropriation and pollution are drastically "ratcheted up," with correspondingly devastating impacts upon socioenvironmental relations and ecosystems across the planet. In effect, the metabolic throughput of capital is "upshifted" into a fossil-powered "big ring," the relentless churning of which transforms the entire planet into a sacrifice zone for capital. We argue that successive rounds of fixed capital investment not only position city/non-city relations as dominant spatial vectors within this big ring of metabolic throughput but also create a "ratchet effect" that effectively locks in progressively escalating metabolizations of matter, energy, and waste—crystallized in large-scale infrastructural configurations—to support the operations of capital. Building upon insights derived from feminist Marxist and eco-Marxist theory, we consider the ways in which city-building processes within the fossil-based metabolic regime hinge upon the appropriation of unpaid work/energy from non-city territories and environments and the concomitant degradation and ruination of the latter through the crisis-driven dynamics of accumulation. These arguments underscore the imperial dimensions of planetary urbanization and have significant implications for debates on cities and energy transitions in a world structured by the "bad infinity" of capital.

Biography

Neil Brenner, Lucy Flower Professor of Urban Sociology at the University of Chicago, is a critical urban theorist, sociologist, and geographer interested in all aspects of research on cities and urbanization within the social sciences, the environmental humanities, the design disciplines, and environmental studies. His writing and teaching focus on the theoretical, conceptual, and methodological dimensions of urban questions and on the challenges of reinventing our approach to urbanization in relation to the crises, contradictions, and struggles of our time. Brenner has made influential contributions to scholarly debates on critical urban theory, the critique of capitalist urbanization, urban restructuring, state space, the political economy of rescaling, variegated neo-liberalization, and planetary urbanization. His current work is focused on the question of how "hinterlands"—the non-city territories, infrastructures, and ecologies that support urban life—are being remade under contemporary supply-chain capitalism. This inquiry aims to connect the study of urbanization more directly to the analysis not only of primary commodity production (the historical geographies of agro-industrial and extractive capitalism) but also to the critical exploration of contemporary environmental crises and emergent struggles for post-fossil—and postcapitalist—planetary futures. 

Brenner's most recent books are New Urban Spaces: Urban Theory and the Scale Question (Oxford, 2019) and Critique of Urbanization: Selected Essays (Bauwelt Fundamente, 2016), as well as the edited volume Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization (Jovis, 2014). Brenner's previous books include New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood (Oxford University Press, 2004) and the coedited volumes Cities for People, not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City (with Peter Marcuse and Margit Mayer; Routledge 2011); and Spaces of Neoliberalism: Urban Restructuring in North America and Western Europe (with Nik Theodore; Blackwell, 2003). Brenner's writings have been widely translated into other languages, including complete books or essay collections published or forthcoming in Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, and Turkish.