Three Ecologies: Urban Metabolism and the Society-Nature Opposition

Abstract

This article is an intellectual history of two enduring binaries—society-nature and city-countryside—and their co-identification, told through evolving uses of the concept of “urban metabolism.” After recounting the emergence of the modern society-nature opposition in the separation of town and country under early industrial capitalism, I interpret “three ecologies”—successive periods of urban metabolism research spanning three disciplines within the social sciences. The first is the human ecology of the Chicago School, which treated the city as an ecosystem in analogy to external, natural ecosystems. The second is industrial ecology: materials-flow analyses of cities that conceptualize external nature as the source of urban metabolism's raw materials and the destination for its social wastes. The third is urban political ecology, a reconceptualization of the city as a product of diverse socio-natural flows. By analyzing these three traditions in succession, I demonstrate both the efficacy and the limits to Catton and Dunlap's distinction between a “human exemptionalist paradigm” and a “new ecological paradigm” in sociology.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author would like to thank Hillary Angelo, Neil Brenner, Colin Jerolmack, Anne Rademacher, Esmé Webb, and the participants in the NYLON workshop for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of the article.

NOTES

Notes

¹ Two exceptions are Berger's (1980) brief account of capitalist urbanization's relegation of animals to the domestic sphere as pets, and Foster's (2000) elaboration of Marx's theory of metabolic rift. But the former has overwhelmingly been read as an animal studies intervention, while the latter is focused specifically on the soil-nutrient cycle between farms and cities. Neither is commonly read as a general account of the relationship between the separation of town and country and the society-nature divide. Williams's (1973) The Country and the City, by contrast, is highly influential but places less emphasis on the discontinuities of the Industrial Revolution and more on the long and ambiguous historical lineage of rural enclosure and social transformation in England, and thus stands as a partial dissent from my argument here.