Abstract
This chapter argues that Spanish urban cultural studies would benefit from incorporating the ecological aspects of cities into its theoretical frameworks and thereby better attune itself to the cultural changes underway in the current context of socially and ecologically unsustainable urban growth machines. I integrate the study of a number of Iberian cultural manifestations into four distinct but non-exclusive categories, according to the way in which the socioecological metabolism of the city is conceived and depicted in relation to both the dominant imaginary of economic growth and its unsustainable energy regime. The suggested interpretative typology can be summarized as follows: (1) The Crisis of the Urban Growth Machine; (2) Urban Collapse and Post-Petroleum Futures; (3) Non-Urban Spaces and Neo-Ruralization: Escaping the Urban Growth Machine; and (4) Postgrowth Urban Imaginaries: Imagining and Performing Ecopolis.
Highlights
How do we stop ourselves from fulfilling our fates as suicidally productive drones in a carbon-addicted hive, destroying ourselves in some kind of psychopathic colony collapse disorder? —Roy Scranton1
Teague complained about ‘the historical gap between environmentalism, cultural studies, and the urban experience’.2. These urban cultural scholars had noticed that ecocriticism paid insufficient attention to the urban environment and that there was a need for an urban ecological cultural criticism
They edited a volume of essays—The Nature of Cities: Ecocriticism and Urban Environments—intended to ‘provide the parameters for an urban ecocriticism that offers the ecological component often missing from cultural analyses of the city and the urban perspective often lacking in environmental approaches to contemporary culture’
Summary
In 1999, Michael Bennett and David W. In order to challenge the dominant imaginary and to create something beyond the epistemological limitations self-imposed by the hegemonic rationality, it is paramount to expose the roots of the dominant logic that separates human and nonhuman concerns To keep this in mind as cultural critics, it would be helpful to mobilize the following socioecological concepts when approaching city naturecultures: metabolic rift and urban metabolism.[20]. I hope other Iberian scholars find these interpretative categories useful for reading contemporary cultural manifestations through the lens of urban ecocriticism (beyond the multiple examples I provide in the following pages) The first of these interpretative categories explores the current negative social and ecological outcomes of neoliberal urban development in the context of the ongoing Spanish crisis by focusing on the discarded output of the urban linear metabolism: massive waste and precarious lives. I will demonstrate the usefulness of this typology by applying it to a range of post-2008 Iberian literary and cultural manifestations
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