THE PLANETARY METABOLISM OF CAPITAL

Neil Brenner is a Lucy Flower Professor of Urban Sociology at the University of Chicago, Chair of the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization (CEGU) and director of the Urban Theory Lab. As a critical urban theorist, sociologist and geographer, he is 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.

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), The Hinterland Question: Urban Theory in the Shatter Zone. This book argues for an approach to urban theory that is adequate to 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 that 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.

Host or Publisher Centre de recherche sur le futur des villes