Abstract
AbstractRecent scholarship on the materiality of cities has been criticized by critical urban scholars for being overly descriptive and failing to account for political economy. We argue that through the conceptualization of urban metabolisms advanced by ecological economists and industrial ecologists, materialist and critical perspectives can be mutually enriching. We focus on conflict that has erupted in Delhi, India. Authorities have embraced waste‐to‐energy incinerators, and wastepickers fear that these changes threaten their access to waste, while middle class residents oppose them because of their deleterious impact on ambient air quality. We narrate the emergence of an unlikely alliance between these groups, whose politics opposes the production of a waste‐based commodity frontier within the city. We conclude that the materiality and political economy of cities are co‐constituted, and contestations over the (re)configuration of urban metabolisms span these spheres as people struggle to realize situated urban political ecologies.
Highlights
Residents of south Delhi’s Okhla area were delighted to see what they thought was the season’s first snowfall
To the former this struggle is material in essence as they seek to reduce their exposure to waste on the grounds that it poses a health risk, while the latter are engaged in a political economic contestation whose aim is to defend a source of livelihood
To this end we draw on industrial ecology and ecological economics, for which materiality lacks agency but must be accounted for and can be quantified; in this particular case we focus on the composition, volume, and metabolic density of Delhi’s waste
Summary
The conceptualization of cities as metabolisms has a long history (Decker et al 2000; Geddes 1885; Giampietro et al 2012; Martinez-Alier 1987; Mumford 1938; Wolman 1965—see Newell and Cousins 2014 for an overview) and over the course of the past decades there has been a “virtual explosion” (Fischer-Kowalski 1998:62) of research on urban metabolisms. By embracing an understanding of metabolism influenced by industrial ecology and ecological economics whose focus is actual material flows, we seek to develop a situated understanding of waste in Delhi at the core of which is a complex relationship between its materiality (eg volume, composition, density and its biophysical transformation) and political economy (eg ownership, access and value struggles) In this urban metabolism non-human entities lack agency but must be accounted for in a literal sense because a change in their character or quantity, or the way in which they are acted upon, can profoundly impact political economic processes. During this time we interacted with key stakeholders involved in everyday struggles over waste management, and we augmented these experiences with semi-structured interviews during follow-up visits in 2013 and 2014
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