We are pleased to announce the Global Land Squeeze Symposium keynote with Neil Brenner who is the Lucy Flower Professor of Urban Sociology, Director of the Urban Theory Lab (UTL), and Chair of the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization (CEGU) at the University of Chicago. In his talk, Neil will be drawing on arguments from his ongoing book project, Into the Shatter Zone: Capitalist Urbanization and the Hinterland Question (co-authored with Swarnabh Ghosh, Harvard University).

The events of the Global Land Squeeze Symposium are free and open to AU staff and students as well as the general public. This talk is part of the AUFF-funded project “Infrastructural Cascades: A New Approach to Anthropocene Landscape Change". Please see description and full programme of the Symposium here.

Abstract

The book seeks to develop an approach to critical urban theory that is adequate to an era in which the planetary biosphere is being systematically degraded through capital’s voracious, carbon-intensive pursuit of exponential cumulative growth. This conjuncture of proliferating ecological crises compels us to move beyond universalizing, city-centric approaches to the urban question, and to explore the historically specific form of urbanization that was consolidated and planetarized under the fossil-based metabolic regime of capitalism (1870s to the present). To this end, we develop a dialectical framework that places city/non-city relations, their infrastructural materializations, and their planetary metabolic reverberations at the center of both theory and practice. The focus here is not simply the construction of new fossil-fueled spaces of industrial agglomeration, but the planetary metabolic relays and carbon-intensive infrastructural configurations linking urban concentration to high-throughput zones of extraction, industrial agriculture, logistics, energy processing, and waste. Drawing on feminist Marxist and eco-Marxist insights, we show how industrial forms of city-building under the fossil-based metabolic regime depend on the unpaid/underpaid appropriation of matter, energy, and labor from non-city “hidden abodes” while degrading and exhausting them – and their populations – through various forms of plunder and pollution. Successive rounds of carbon-intensive fixed-capital investment and landscape transformation across the Earth articulate city/non-city relations to capital’s ever-escalating metabolization of matter, energy, labor, and waste in pursuit endless growth, even as this very process eviscerates the planetary web of life. These processes underscore the thano-metabolic dimensions of planetary urbanization and carry major implications for contemporary debates on urban sustainability, climate justice, and energy transition in a world structured by capital’s “bad infinity,” climate colonialism, and deepening eco-apartheid. The lecture concludes by considering prospects for “alter-urbanizations” and “alter-metabolisms” of degrowth, repair, and regeneration that might interrupt capital’s destructive planetary trajectory.