Urbanization in the shatter zone:                                                              theses on cities, fossil energy, and biospheric crisis

How should we understand cities—and their shifting spatial configurations—in an era of accelerating climate change and biospheric crisis? This lecture argues that answering this question requires not only new empirical research but a new framework for critical urban theory. Rather than treating the city as a bounded territorial unit, it proposes that urbanization under capitalism be understood through the evolving relations between cities and the wider operational landscapes (of biogeophysical appropriation and waste) that support them.

From the late nineteenth century onward, capitalist urbanization has been organized through a fossil-fuel-based metabolic regime that links urban agglomerations to expanding, carbon-intensive landscapes of extraction, industrial agriculture, energy production, logistics, and waste. These interconnected processes have reshaped urban space while dramatically intensifying the circulation, capitalization, and entropic dissipation of matter and energy across the planet.

A central focus of the lecture is the role of fixed capital within this fossil-based metabolic regime. Long-term investments in buildings, infrastructures, transport systems, agro-industrial zones, and extractive landscapes—within and beyond major metropolitan regions—have not only enabled unprecedented waves of capitalist growth but have also locked societies into increasingly resource-, carbon-, and waste-intensive patterns of production, circulation, and consumption. These fixed capital investments create a “ratchet effect,” embedding successive rounds of geo-metabolic intensification in durable infrastructural landscapes that lock in progressively intensifying metabolic throughput along with escalating streams of biogeophysical appropriation, pollution, and waste.

Within this geohistorical formation, urbanization cannot be understood solely through the spatial organization of cities themselves. It must also be examined with reference to the broader infrastructural matrices, operational landscapes, imperial political ecologies, and geo-metabolic dynamics that animate city/non-city relations under a fossil-based regime of capital. Drawing upon feminist Marxist and eco-Marxist perspectives, the lecture argues that these processes depend upon the continual appropriation of matter, energy, land, and labor from non-city territories, while simultaneously degrading and destabilizing the environments on which urbanization—and social life more generally--depend. Reconceptualizing urban morphology in these terms is essential for any approach to environmental architecture, design, and planning that seeks to contribute to struggles for more just, livable, and non-violent urban futures on a rapidly warming planet.​