Sensing visceral urban politics and metabolic exclusion in a Chinese neighbourhood

Abstract

Insofar as the production of space is intimately bound up with the bodily senses, it would be reasonable to posit that the politics of space is also at the same time a politics of the senses. In this context, the theoretical remit of this paper is to extend our analysis of the role of the senses in theorising a visceral politics of urban exclusion. Using the case study of a middle‐class neighbourhood or xiaoqu in Shanghai, the paper interrogates how class‐based sensory ‘othering’ is deployed to preserve and regulate the socio‐metabolic environment of the neighbourhood sensorium and justify urban exclusion. Such revanchist (sensory) urbanism, however, is irreducible to the cultural politics of neoliberalism, but also deeply implicated in actually existing metabolic inequalities in contemporary urban China. In particular, those whose metabolic needs are devalued are often stigmatised and cast as ‘sensorial others’ with repulsive sensory and metabolic bodily practices that are at odds with the urban middle‐class. By bringing together critical literature on sensory urbanism and urban metabolism, a key contribution of this paper is to advance the theorisation of visceral micro‐politics of urban exclusion that is experienced and ‘sensed’ through everyday metabolic inequalities in urban China.