Geographic Rift in the Urban Periphery, and Its Concrete Manifestations in Morelia, Mexico

Abstract

Capitalist urbanization is recognized as an important aspect of environmental change and conflict in Latin America. Karl Marx’s theory of metabolic rift can offer powerful insights into the alienated mediation of society and nature underlying the socio-ecological contradictions and conflicts associated with urbanization, but has been under-utilized in urban political ecology. Building on the concept of geographic rift, we demonstrate how urbanization as both a social metabolic process in itself and an important factor in other social metabolic processes, implicates capital’s fundamental contradictions in alienation from the land and its use-values and the subordination of human needs to capital accumulation. After developing the basic theoretical contours of these concepts, we provide an illustrative example of their concrete manifestations in urbanization of the periphery of Morelia, Mexico. We conclude with a discussion of how metabolic rift theory strengthens the radical critique of sustainability in urban political ecology and encourages struggles to defend the material conditions of human development within the capital system, while pointing to the need for structural change to bring about the conditions necessary for a conscious, sustainable social metabolism.