The hinterlands of everywhere: towards a political ecology of Planetary Urbanization in the capitalist World-Ecology

Keywords: poltical ecology, urban political ecology, world-ecology, metabolism, historical geographical materialism, social reproduction
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

This paper offers a critical review of the evolution of Urban Political Ecology (UPE) and argues for a reinvigorated approach to the urban metabolism through a UPE in explicit dialogue with the “world-ecology” conversation (Moore 2015, 2017).

UPE employs the concept of metabolism to denote the dialectical social and bio-physical process through which cities and urban natures are produced and their accompanying environmental injustices (Gandy 2004; Swyngedouw 1996). Recent scholarship associated with the Lefebvrian notion of “Planetary Urbanization” (Arboleda 2020) has attempted to remedy UPE’s purported “methodological cityism” (Angelo and Wachsmuth 2015) by theorizing the urban metabolism within a greater totality, revealing drastic socio-spatial changes accompanying upscaled mining activities. This work reveals extractivism as an exhaustive metabolic relation towards land, resources and their accompanying geographies of labour. Meanwhile, critical geographies of migration and informal labour have emphasized the centrality of externalizing social reproduction onto rural, cheaper and often less commodified spaces (Gidwani and Maringanti 2016; Mezzadri 2021; Shah and Lerche 2020). These developments concur with the “world-ecology” emphasis on the decisive role of the appropriation of value from human and non-human nature in accumulation (Moore 2015). Such revelations about the enduring logic of the periphery and unequal ecological exchange in the “non-city” (Arboleda 2016) need not mean UPE should abandon investigation of the northern metropolises. On the contrary, if the spatial relation of the periphery is increasingly granular and “ubiquitous” (Arboleda, 2020), discarding occidental exceptionalism calls for investigation into bundles of minimally commodified nature in the hinterlands of everywhere.