Metabolic Urbanism: Epistemologies, Lineages, and Prospects

Abstract

Every building, infrastructure, or city is the spatial manifestation of metabolizing multiple materials, energy, labor relations, and capital investments from local and distant sources. Yet, an overemphasis on specific sites or projects easily obscures these metabolic interdependencies at a broader scale. Working on urban metabolism concepts, this dissertation examines the role of design in regulating how materials and energy flows circulate, metabolize, and produce urban form. It articulates how the separate realms of extraction, production, circulation, accumulation, and disposal of metabolic flows are integral and generative for design. It elucidates a critical position for design discourse and practice through a boundary-exploding inquiry of transcalar feedback loops between design projects and their life-supporting spaces. Selecting wood as the metabolic flow of analysis examines how the laborious effort of orchestrating its associated social and ecological processes can enable designers to engage with urgent problematiques of anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric concern.

Articulated via the concept of metabolic urbanism, this dissertation proceeds in three parts: epistemologies, lineages, and prospects. Part I offers an intellectual history of the epistemologies of urban metabolism by different scholarly clusters. Part II re-examines an intradisciplinary lineage of design discourses, models, and interventions driven by metabolic considerations. Finally, Part III reflects on metabolically significant design prospects where wood, as one critical flow of urbanization, plays a key role. Metabolic urbanism critically advances the knowledge of urban metabolism in design by following the intricate flows that comprise the urban fabric at a planetary scale. It articulates the discursive and projective potentials of architecture and urbanism when shaped by metabolic transcalar interdependencies.