 Hello everyone, and welcome to the Circular Metabolism Podcast, a bi-weekly meeting where we have in-depth discussions with researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to better understand the metabolism of our cities, or in other words, their resource use and pollution emissions, and how to reduce them in a systemic, socially just, and context-specific way. I'm your host, Aristide from Metabolism of Cities, and on today's episode we will talk about a different way of understanding, representing, and interpreting cities and urban theater. In general, we all understand cities as the opposite of rural areas. In fact, most of us have heard these UN statistics that more than 50% of people live in cities, but that figure embodies a definition and a role of cities. Today we will challenge this definition and look at the more intricate relationships between the urban and non-urban through the concepts of planetary urbanization and operational landscapes. To talk about this fascinating topic, I have not one but two guests. On the one hand, Neil Brenner, who is professor of urban sociology at the University of Chicago. He is a critical urban theorist, sociologist, and geographer who is interested in all aspects of research on cities and urbanization within the social sciences, environmental humanities, design disciplines, and environmental studies. He has authored a number of books. I think some of them you might know, New Urban Spaces, Urban Theory, and the Scale Question, apologies, and Implosion Explosions towards a study of the planetary urbanization, which we'll dive a bit deeper today. So, as I said before, we started the podcast. Neil has been a major inspiration for this podcast because he was one of the only urban scholars who had a podcast before I launched this podcast, and I really enjoyed this format. And I also have, Nico Skatzikis, a fellow countryman who is an assistant professor at TU Delft, and researcher at the Urban Theory Lab, Chicago, and Future Cities Laboratory at ETH Zurich. He holds a Doctor of Design from Harvard Graduate School of Design, and he is working at the intersection of urbanization theory, design, and geospatial analysis. We'll understand this relationship later on. And through cartographic experimentation, he helps us understand these socio-metabolic relationships between agglomerations and their operational landscapes. Just before we kick off this episode, I'd like to make a small request from you listeners and watchers. If you like this podcast, please help us to spread it around by sharing it with your colleagues, friends, and family, because I'm pretty sure that you might understand the city in one way, and I hope that today you understand the city in a different way. Please continue the discussion through different social media, through YouTube, and all of that, and this is the best way to continue this ever-long discussion. With all that being said, welcome, Neil. Welcome, Nico, and thanks for joining the podcast. Thank you so much, Irish City. Thank you so much, Arsteed. It's great to be here. Great. Fantastic. In general, I ask to have a more introduction of yourself and a trajectory, I think, in order to keep this a bit more constructed, because we're three of us, I'd like perhaps if you can give us some key milestones or periods of your trajectory or of your academic background to understand how you arrived studying these topics of planetary urbanization, operational landscapes, and stuff like that. Perhaps how you went from your original background to that concept. Neil, perhaps as you're the furthest away, you can start. Sure. I mean, I've been doing this for a long time, so that's a complicated question, but I'll try to be concise. I mean, my background actually is in philosophy, and that training really continues to be formative for how I think about all aspects of urban studies and urbanization. I did my PhD in political science, and in that context, I was studying questions about urban governance restructuring, and then in more recent years, in collaboration with Nico's and Chris John Schmidt and others, I've been really working just on the question of urbanization itself in planetary environmental context. But in some ways, the guiding thread of all that work, I mean, I finished my PhD over 20 years ago, but the guiding thread has been really two things, if I were to boil it down to just the essence. Number one is critically interrogating frameworks of analysis that are used in social research and trying to reveal the ways in which even very empirically oriented and empirically grounded and even quantitative approaches to the study of cities and urbanization presuppose broader theoretical and meta-theoretical assumptions about knowledge, about the construction of objects of knowledge, and indeed about the politics of knowledge. And so that's obviously formative for the work that we've been doing on planetary urbanization is revealing or trying to reveal the ways in which apparently self-evident assumptions about cities, urbanization, the urban age, urban sustainability, and so forth actually presuppose assumptions which really require critical interrogation. And once you do that, once you do that in relation to sort of ongoing processes of socio-spatial and environmental change, it actually becomes clear that we frequently need to reinvent and even radically reinvent our frameworks of analysis. So that's one guiding thread which, you know, however my work changes, I don't really see, I think that's just a core commitment. It's something I learned in philosophy and just continues to be essential. But the other guiding thread of my work, which is also very relevant I think to this discussion and certainly to collaborations with Nicos and others, is I'm deeply committed to critical theory and critical social science and critical urban studies. And that means part of the point of interrogating inherited frameworks of knowledge is that there's an intrinsic connection between knowledge and power and knowledge and injustice and thus the critique of knowledge formations and ideologies, in this case urban ideologies, is absolutely essential to the project of social emancipation and also in the context of environmental crises, creating a more environmentally sane mode of existence on the earth. And that's of course a kind of commitment that we find in Marxism, we find it in feminism, we find it in different forms in post-colonial studies, in queer theory, in different streams of indigenous studies and so forth. So I view that as a kind of commitment that among a variety of different streams of critical social science that the nexus between power and knowledge, once you sort of critically interrogate that, it opens up a horizon not only for the critique of ideological formations, but a horizon for trying to develop new formations of knowledge that explicitly serve not just the critique of injustice, but the creation of more just and more environmentally sane modes of existence. And I view that as just essential to urban studies, to the work of critical urban studies, and it certainly informs all the teaching that I do and all the research that I do. And again, there are different ways to do it, but among various divergent approaches and disagreements within left academia and left approaches to urban knowledge, I think that's a common thread that unites otherwise or at least brings together, may not unite them, but it brings together otherwise divergent streams of research and divergent epistemologies. Thanks a lot. Nikos, perhaps you would like to also share a bit your trajectory. Yeah, maybe I will do it in a different way describing a more, let's say, personal journey of mine and how I ended up working on those issues. So I started architecture initially in Athens, and I think the most important thing that I got out of these studies for me was an understanding of space as a way of forming various processes and being engaged in the formation of various processes. So the importance of the physical configuration of things, so very literal with Clidian space, the materiality of it, the spatial patterns of it. And the second was the power of representation of various phenomena. And slowly I started moving away from the scale of the building to the scale of the region and started engaging with questions of regional design and all the complexities, the social and environmental complexities that this entail. And eventually when I started working on my dissertation, it was actually almost accidental that we crossed paths with Neil, because I was at the GSD at Harvard already trying to figure out exactly what I was doing. I was at the time working on something I called geographical urbanism, which was mostly an effort to introduce geography and design and inform each other. And then I believe when Neil arrived from NYU, it was at the time that he was developing with Christian Schmidt, or at least probably you were developing it for a while. But I think the papers were already fresh that you did with Christian and your public. What was it, the public spaces? What was it? It was an article in public culture. Public culture, yes. It was an organization that was one of the early contributions to the work that we were doing. Exactly. So that was already a very key moment. And it was quite interesting because I was kind of trying to move away a bit from doing a design dissertation and moving towards questions that would allow me to basically unpack a bit the agency of design beyond the city. Because I started realizing that eventually, if you are in any design school or in the schools for the built environment or whatever environmental design, it's very funny that most of the built environments and most of the spaces that we are actually shaping, they are not in cities. So it seemed to me very evident that the architects and urban designers and planners and landscape architects could be quite happy to engage with a much larger area than they are confined to. I mean, I'm joking, of course, but besides the market that it would open, it actually was a much more well-informed way of saving a environment. Instead of trying to solve social ecological issues only within cities, I tried to figure out the ways that certain processes bring several landscapes together. And my dissertation was exactly about this question of the of the hinterland, what is the landscapes that are supporting cities, but the hinterland not as a metabolic process or a follow the flows approach, but as a very grounded situation of very particular landscapes and formations of spaces, you know, material formations of spaces, physical configuration of spaces, all these things. So I was quite interested in the spatial dimension of the urban metabolism question. And also I was quite interested that when I started working with Neil, I realized that there was all these emphasis in urban theory and critical urban theory to introduce, you know, space again, you know, with David Harvey, with Edward Soja. But if you actually discussed this literature in the context of an architecture school, everyone would be, but this is completely non-spatial, right? Where is the space? Because space for us was the very physical material configuration of structures, of infrastructures, of landscapes, right? So this is one point that's made me start thinking that, okay, maybe this, you know, cross fertilization could be quite interesting, not just us in design taking knowledge from these disciplines in urban studies and critical urban theory, but also contributing something back. And the second way that this could happen would be actually through a much more reflexive and critical introduction of quantitative geospatial reasoning into critical urban theory that was actually completely rejected, let's say, from the whole debate. And somehow I tried to find my position between those two disciplines. And I think actually one thing that Neil didn't mention, and I think he should unpack more. It should be him that should unpack more. It's that all of the urban theory lab because I think I was very lucky that when Neil came, he also set up this research platform and lab. And it was a quite interesting era for me and everyone who went around Neil at that point, it was a really unique and dynamic environment. So I will leave it here, but I think Neil should definitely unpack a bit what we're trying to do back then. Sure. I mean, my follow-up question was perhaps to continue on this discussion of critical theory or critical urban theory. And perhaps this will also join with what Nico's just mentioned on the role of the Harvard or urban theory lab, which was well, the conceptualization or the ill conceptualization of cities and what are all of the baggage or the concealed or the embodied elements that it hides if we define a city in a certain manner or another. You say that there is, well, it's the taxonomy of space that we have today is quite problematic. And it has been inherited from previous knowledge. Or perhaps it's not knowledge, perhaps it's other things. Does that relate to the work that you did at the urban theory lab? And perhaps could you help us go beyond this dichotomy urban spaces, non-urban spaces, and how this does not help actually to understand what a city is? Sure. So in a certain way, this question is the big question that has animated so much work within our group. My own work, my work with Chris John Schmid, my work with Nico's, my work with other collaborators in more recent years like Swarnab Ghosh, and our collective kind of project. So maybe I'll just try to summarize in very general terms the basis for that project. Nico says, of course, already alluded to it, and I'll add a bit. And then we can also articulate that in relation to the collective projects in the urban theory lab, which began at Harvard. To some degree, it began before that, but it really got into gear during those years at Harvard GSD. I got there in 2011. I departed in 2010, 2020, excuse me. So for about nine years, and that project will continue, is continuing in a different formation here at the University of Chicago. But in terms of the general question that you raise our skeet about the city and the non-city, the urban, and whatever that non-urban, I put that in quotation marks what it is. So the basic idea, there have been a variety of formulations of this problem atique. Here's how I would summarize it now. In general, contemporary urban theory and really most of 20th century urban theory, with some important exceptions that we can certainly unpack, because the exceptions are very, very interesting in all kinds of ways. But as a broad generalization, the city has been conceived as coherently demarcated from a non-city or non-urban outside, usually with reference to some kind of urban, suburban, rural typology and variations thereof. And perhaps more importantly, or I would say more importantly for our agenda, the city has been conceived as at least within traditions, various traditions of agglomeration theory as economically self-propelled. So a concentration point of population, investment in infrastructure, and there are a variety of different explanations of how and why this is the case within economic geography and urban studies. But whatever the explanation is adopted, the assumption is that once you have that kind of constellation of proximate operations, usually defined in terms of population, investment, infrastructure, and some combination, there's a sort of internal dynamic of development of urban growth. And in a nutshell, like we refer to that set of assumptions as kind of agglomeration theory. And again, there are different variations that emphasize variously population or economic clusters, or sometimes environmental conditions that are specific to an agglomeration. And in general, our argument, it's been misunderstood in some of the literature, including in a very recent paper by my former teacher, Alan J. Scott of UCLA, this position has been misinterpreted as somehow the claim that the city no longer exists, or that the boundaries of the city are blurry, and that it's just kind of a blob of urban slime that's spilling over across the earth. There are lots of versions of that argument out there. But that's not our argument, and that's not the claim around planetary urbanization. The claim, as I understand it, as I've been developing it with Nicos and other colleagues, is that in order to understand the agglomeration, the processes of agglomeration that I think very appropriately have been emphasized in radical and mainstream urban theory for 100 plus years, in order to understand that condition, we actually need to understand the non-city preconditions and consequences of city-building. And the work that we've been doing on extended urbanization and planetary urbanization and differential urbanization is an attempt to unpack historically, geographically, geopolitically, and environmentally the implications of an analysis of the non-city preconditions and consequences. And I'm sure in this conversation we'll unpack that proposition in more detail, but again in very general terms. The non-city preconditions include obviously primary commodity production, so agricultural production, organized in a variety of different ways, industrial, but also non- or less industrial. Systems of extraction of minerals, materials, and also fuel. So the whole problematic of energy regimes is thus revealed not only as a problem of energy efficiency within cities, but a question of energy supply and extractive circuits. So Martín Arboleta's recent book Planetary Mind and the work of Mazen Laban elaborates that puzzle in very productive historical geographical terms. Systems of logistics, so all of the circulatory infrastructures from air routes and airports to railways and rail systems to roads and other, you know, obviously shipping and the maritime geographies of logistics become part of a kind of planetary or at least multi-scalar urban tissue. And then one has to analyze those historical geographies of spatial and environmental transformation over the long-duray across the systemic cycles of capital accumulation. The ways in which they are produced and transformed in relation to cycles of urbanization or cycles of city-building is a bit of a black box. In other words, we have lots of important studies that open up that black box, that gesture towards an analysis of connecting the hinterland, so-called, or the non-city to the city in a systemic way, not just as a contingent background condition, but for the most part those are gestures or forays. And again, we can talk about some of the important forays in that regard. William Cronin, Gray Brecken, his important work on Imperial San Francisco and, you know, some other important work that, you know, Nikos and I are trying to engage with in detail in developing our theorization. There's also the question of the ways in which these non-city landscapes, they undergo creative destruction during the long-duray of capitalist urban development. They're not just a rural outside, but they undergo various transformations that need to be systematically analyzed in relation to cycles of city-building and the crises associated with city-building. And we have more to say about that. This is very much what we're working on these days. But just to talk briefly now about the consequences, so my definition or my initial formulation was the non-city preconditions and consequences. So those are some very general marks about the preconditions, which again we can be very eager to unpack in more detail in relation to our work on the hinterland question and operational landscapes of planetary urbanization and so on. The consequences, I mean, among other things, we're dealing with waste and with toxic and other forms of waste that are engendered through city-building. So it's very much connected to questions that, you know, I know your group have been engaging with our state on the circular metabolism or just the metabolic circuitry. So the detritus, the discards, the waste products of urbanization in relation to various fundamental metabolic dimensions of life, whether in terms of non-human species and the implications of urbanization for the non-human species, both near and far, whether in terms of water, whether in terms of air. And of course, this immediately brings us to the question of carbon. So much of the atmosphere, it's very difficult to sort of geographically classify carbon. And the work of Luke Bergman is really pioneering in that regard at UBC. Like he's really opened up some fundamental perspectives on like how do you actually analyze carbon emissions in a spatially rigorous way. And so we have a lot to learn from Luke Bergman's work in this regard. But for the moment, the point is simply that it can be argued, and we certainly would argue that much of the carbon that's now floating around in the atmosphere in some apparently disembodied way is the direct result of the kind of metabolic churn, as we call it, the metabolic churn of the capitalist form of urbanization. It's not to say that all the emissions directly occur through some kind of city-based moment. But insofar as the dynamics of city building are relationally, intrinsically connected to the various preconditions that I briefly summarized earlier related to primary commodity production, energy, and logistics. The metabolic churn of urbanization also engenders very consequential forms of toxic waste, including CO2 emissions, that ultimately brutal, devastating, extremely dangerous feedback loop have planetary consequences and have for quite some time that are in turn transforming the very conditions within which city building does and will occur for the foreseeable future. So in short, the problem antique of the non-city is for us a way to critically embed our investigation of city building within a broader critical analysis of the historical geographies of capitalist metabolism beyond the city, both behind the city and in some ways as a consequence of city building over the long-duray. And in particular, a lot of our work is really focused on kind of neoliberalized global capitalism. But in order to understand this moment, we have to really roll back over the long-duray at least to the sort of consolidation of fossil capital, what Andreas Maugham famously calls fossil capitalism in the 1850s. But we would also, we're also very sympathetic to and learn a lot from our friend and colleague, Jason Moore, who insistently urges us to go back over the very long-duray to the very origins of capitalism in the long 16th century in terms of tracking this particular dynamic of metabolic, you know, socio-metabolic transformation. Yeah, so many elements come to mind that. I think, so we now have this, you mentioned the preconditions and consequences of the non-city. I'd like to help people that listen and watch to better understand where we are and to better understand to transition from the current explanation of a city and the current statistics of a city to understanding what is really under the hood, right? And I think, so Nicos, today, you know, you had this books that were mentioning all of the statistics on them, for instance, and there are these famous statistics about cities. Most of us that work in urban and environmental challenges are going to have these statistics as their first slide somehow, right? The 3%, the 50%, and stuff like that. I know they hurt. Could you please still say, give a brief context starting with these uber-famous statistics and how they're linked to this idea of agglomeration or spiky urbanism and why these figures are actually misleading and what is the real counterpart of the 3% and of the 50%. Yeah. I think that that's definitely a very lucid way to put it. Although, I also want to return to the first point that Neil made about contextualizing a bit the importance of this question and I will immediately link it back to your question because I think it's important to keep in mind that all these agenda that Neil and myself and Christian are introducing, it's not necessarily antithetical to the existing research that you have on cities. I would see it more as complementary to it and, you know, one way to actually understand what's the missing part of most of the work being done in urban studies is, you know, I like to use this phrase by Brian Berry at some point. He said, you know, you can think of or you can study cities as systems within networks of cities. So basically the area that we are investigating, it's either the internal dynamics of cities, so what is happening within the agglomeration or if you want to study the external dynamics of cities, it's again connections to other cities, right? So you have this dual focus, right? And you used to have this dual focus for a very long time, so you either study the relationship between cities, you know, polycentricity, all these things, or you study the internal structure of city, you know, social inequality, how it relates to space, all these things, right? And from these investigations that are all very valid and very useful, right, what is, you know, missing and I think now it's obvious in this discussion is that cities, the external relationships of cities, if you really want to, you know, coin them external, they are not just with other cities or with other settlements that they are also with all these other landscapes that are not necessarily cities, not necessarily settlements at all, not even inhabited sometimes, right? And to go back to your question now, if you take all the area of cities just to make a very, you know, simple comparison, the cities, exactly because they're concentrated points, they don't take up that much land. They are, you know, anywhere between two million and four million square kilometers, while, you know, the land surface of the planet is something like, you know, 100 million, you know, not the one that is, you know, ice covered, obviously. So it's something like two, three percent in terms of area. And then if you try to grasp how much land we are directly or indirectly using mostly through agriculture, through mining, through forestry, you know, through this circulation of resources, so transportation network, this is something, you know, like say 60, 70 million square kilometers. So it's around 70 percent of the of the used land of the planet. So indeed, it's just in terms of land use. It's very insignificant. But you know, someone might say that, you know, land use is not important because this is where the people are. So if, you know, 80 percent of the population lives in cities, this should be the area of, you know, focus. This should be the areas of research, right? But the problem with this extended land use is that it also has a major environmental impact. And of course, it's not just the environmental impact. It's also the, you know, more or less densely populated communities that live in these areas, right? So in terms of social justice, environmental justice, you know, climate change, actually, it's not the cities themselves, you know, as areas. It is their broader impact across the world, basically. So I think this is what we're trying to do. We are trying to reintroduce this question of this, you know, multitude of landscapes that were, you know, initially, there were somewhere always part of the discussion about urbanization, you know, even if you start looking at the mainstream history of urbanization, it always has something to do with the social and spatial division of labor between, you know, the areas, the concentrated areas, and the agricultural, you know, areas that are producing the surplus to basically help support these cities. This is, you know, the only way the city can exist. And of course, you know, it's a contested debate, you know, it did say to create agriculture all the other way around. But this is not part of the discussion. The discussion here is to understand that without these ecological surplus, you can't really have these moments of concentration. Right. And in terms of, you know, land use, land area, you know, these moments of concentration are actually insignificant. It's the resource basis that is extremely important for dealing with climate change with the complexities of social and environmental issues that we're facing. Yeah. And, and this opens up to do this. Well, you mentioned it to this urban blob, Neil, beforehand. This still begs the question, you know, I mean, when you talk about urban metabolism, when you talk about systems and cities, you know, the first, the first step of any analysis is to define system boundaries. And you said, you know, these are hinterlands. We're going to come back to it, right? I mean, how hinterlands is perhaps also not the right term to use. But this also kind of asks or begs the question, where do you draw the line? Where does the city ends? And I mean, I have this romantic idea that someday we're going to have the precise hinterland of all cities, and we're going to have, you know, crossed hinterlands, and we're going to be able to to really see how what is the relationship between all of the cities and all of that. But can you even draw a line of a city boundary, knowing as well that I think in one of your books, you always cite Henri Lefebvre that said society is completely urbanized. So can we draw a line to to a city, Neil? So just for our listeners and viewers, I just want to signal, I don't know how long we are into this podcast, but we are deep, we are deep into the complexities of the issue. So it's really a pleasure to be, you know, the on ramp into this conversation, you know, was a steep one. And now we're like, we're in the sort of intricate theoretical issues and in the deeply political and normative, normative issues. So let's try to untangle little by little. In terms of, Steve, your last question. So what I would argue, and I don't think I'm alone in making this argument in relation to the broader literatures and critical photography, is that any drawing of a line, whether cartographically or in terms of a system boundary, it's always a political act. And we might even argue that it's always a kind of colonial and, you know, geopolitical act. Who's doing the drawing with what goal and with what vision. And so that's a pretty stark statement. But if you use that as a methodological guide, it enables one to ask some pretty useful questions, also about seemingly more mundane boundary drawing operations in the context of methodological debates, let's say about system boundaries, and to see that, well, it's actually not just a practical, you know, neutral matter, but that it has implications. So let me just give an example. Like if you demarcate the city, and of course, there are different debates about how to do this in terms of like a density gradient of population. And, you know, or a population threshold, you know, an actual numerical population threshold, which is, of course, what Kingsley Davis did, or if you use a density gradient, which to some degree is what Edward Soja did, you know, in the final stage of his illustrious career. You can, and I've heard Michael Storper make this argument too, that there's a law by virtue of which you can draw a boundary around the agglomeration and the outside of the agglomeration. So we can spend, you know, all day or all year debating about how to draw the boundary. But that still fundamentally begs the question about what's the function of doing that. And to the degree that we're in the kind of conversation that we're now in, and Nico's brought in some key terms here about, you know, uneven ecological exchange, we might also use Alphornburg's term of ecological load transfer, environmental load transfer. Once you're talking about kind of appropriation of, you know, of appropriation processes outside the city in order to support city building, the act of drawing a boundary renders that appropriation and that expropriation invisible. And what are the consequences of doing that? There are some important consequences, which in relation to human populations who are displaced through the appropriation and enclosure of non-city landscapes, and who may very well end up in the city or in the peri-urban region as informalized precarious workers, but also environmentally. If you take, you know, fossil fuel as a kind of primary case in point, if you bracket the ways in which the power of agglomeration in, you know, the modern world system, you know, the long 20th centuries fundamentally premised around the world upon the appropriation and capitalization and, you know, the burning of fossil fuels, then you walk away with the image of the city as containing all of this self-propelled capacity to generate various consequences, development, growth, modernization, etc. And you completely render invisible the incredibly destructive social and environmental conditions of that process. So the system boundary may have, the drawing of the system boundary around, you know, Los Angeles or New York City or wherever may have a certain empirical usefulness in terms of a certain kinds of puzzle that one might be investigating. But the consequence of that is actually to, to occlude the very constitutive possibility for that particular form of urbanization. And, you know, again, there are a lot of consequences of this politically, but one of which, which we're dealing with today in the context of eco-urbanist discussions, is that environmental, urban environmental sustainability is at least in most of mainstream discourse about this very urgent matter understood in terms of more efficient modes of energy consumption within the city and its peri-urban periphery. Blackboxing the question of where the energy comes from and where the other commodities that are consumed within the city come from, what kind of energy system they're premised upon, and also just as urgently the question of how to repair both locally and on a planetary scale, the incredible damage, again, both in terms of social, the social fabric, but also the environmental fabric of life, of the world, to repair the damage that's been rocked by 150 plus years of really unfettered fossil capitalist accumulation. So there are lots of other occlusions that flow from drawing the system boundary that way. Our position is not to suggest that there is no system boundary and that we shouldn't try to analyze space and spatial organization in a differentiated way. It depends what the question is. The position rather is that we insist that if our concern is the planetary environmental crisis and its devastatingly uneven social consequences and environmental consequences, there is no system boundary, except that really the planetary scale, and that that has to be kept in mind in order to consider even the most local questions about almost anything that we might care about within a city. That's a pretty strong statement, but we'd have to unpack in more detail what it actually means to draw the system boundary on a planetary scale. I mean, it means, you know, basically at core what Jason Moore has been emphasizing for quite some time now that we need to think relationally and dialectically about the web of life that is the precondition and consequence of capital accumulation and which would also be the precondition and consequence of any post capitalist form of life that we might someday construct. We're always part of and transforming the web of life through everyday social practice and through institutional organization and to the degree that our institutions and our modes of production are premised upon rendering that invisible or taking it for granted as endlessly available free gifts of nature, then we're likely on a very problematic self-destructive path. If I can add something to that, I know we're already, you know, maybe, I don't know, we have almost one hour into the discussion, but I think it's interesting to somehow summarize a bit the question of limits and boundaries in two different let's say frameworks. One, I think, has to do with the spatial definition of it, meaning somehow you need to define either the boundary of the agglomeration itself, right, and we have seen how this has been becoming actually very elusive, right, so even the boundary of the city as a built space, as a social space, at some point after the fifties, started becoming very difficult, right, and we started having all these discussions about, you know, the megalopolis or, you know, urbanized regions and the polycentric metropolis that is a new form of city, but it's not all built up, so basically we have seen how these interpretations of the boundary of the city as a built dense space have been translated into efforts to construct administrative, for example, actors that roughly correspond to them, so we have seen, you know, greater LA or greater Geneva, for example, that is quite close to us. I think it's very interesting because it corresponds to the one type of boundary. The question is, can you actually think of anything similar for the second type of boundary, which is obviously the more ecological metabolic boundary that completely explodes the whole thing, right, so and I think it's an interesting discussion because it has to do with the second point I wanted to make, that there is quite an instrumental function of defining the boundary, so it's not just a conceptual exercise, it has a quite pragmatic, you know, basis, you need it for administration, you need it for research, right, you need to define a, so sometimes you know that it's very hard to do it, but you just need it, right, otherwise you cannot run your model, for example, and the administration of a city knows that it cannot include the whole commuter belt, for example, within its boundary, but it has to have a territorial reflection so it can actually take some decision and obviously have a tax base, have an election, electoral base, all these things and it's interesting that we saw how this has been gradually questioned in terms of the agglomeration boundary. It's an interesting question to consider if we can actually convince people across, you know, both academia and, you know, public governments that it could be a good idea to start considering these extended, you know, processes that link their cities, not just to other cities or to, you know, the suburbs around them, but also to all these metabolic bases that they are depending upon and obviously this cannot be a form of territorial governance, I think that's clear, right, otherwise it will have, and as Neil said, it will have to be a continent or planet, right, and this obviously defeats the purpose. So I think it will have mostly to do with getting away with this boundary necessity and going towards more, let's say, a process based understanding, interpretation of the urbanization processes. I think it's a really interesting question because this territorial identity of the city, the bounded territory of the city has a super long history, right. So again, it's not just a methodological thing, it's also a cultural thing, right. Even today that cities, the agglomerations are so elusive in terms of their form. If you ask, you know, a six, eight year old kid, draw a city, they will draw something like, you know, that looks like a blob, like a boundary with some buildings, like a density of buildings, they will not draw, you know, these diffused patterns of urbanization that we have today, right. So I think it's so much engraved in the cultural, you know, meta geographies that we have of what the city is supposed to look like, that it has, you know, probably also been reflected in these institutional structures, in this methodological questions that we're having. And I think it's a very interesting question. Is the boundary there because we need it? Obviously, some, sometimes yes, we really need the boundary. Or is the boundary there because it's just an inherited meta-geography that doesn't really help us in what we want to do? Yeah, we'll get back to multi-level governance, I think, and things like that. And I remember I had a podcast episode, and I frequently go back to it with a colleague in Arizona State University, and she's working on urban resilience. And once again, she was always asking the five W questions about who is doing resilience and who is benefiting from resilience, and why do we really need resilience and all of that. And I think this brings back to the question of why do we really need a boundary? Who is drawing it? What is the purpose of it, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, I think, yeah, it's a very fair point. And I have been formatted by my practice to define a system boundary and then excluding, including things, freely doing that without all of the weight of, the crushing weight of all of the political implications, the social implications and all of that. I'd like to go a bit further on this topic of hinterland, because this is something that it's, I use the word hinterland, many people use the word hinterland as, you know, this unidirectional elements. The CD is the node, the hinterland is the diffuse pattern all around it, and everything goes in, right? Perhaps there are some, you know, capital flows going out, but very rarely, right? There's just an absorption of flows of matter, of even, you know, capital and labor, or transformed labor within the products. And you instead use the term operational landscapes. And I think this really helps to heterogenize, if I can use this term, the words hinterlands, right? It's not just this homogeneous thing where we just get stuff. Actually, there are productive and operational landscapes. Can you just explain a bit the difference between what is a hinterland and why you use the terms operational landscapes? So I don't know who wants to go first on that. Yeah. So maybe I can go first. I think the idea of the operational landscape starts with the need to deconstruct, I think, two things. The one is that the hinterland is somehow a continuous entity around the city. And the second is that the hinterland is something that is directly connected to a particular city. So the problem is that today, if you look at most of the, you know, primary production and how it is actually articulated, and how it is eventually connected to the consumption points, you don't necessarily have, or actually, you very rarely have this very direct connection that there is one particular location. It's a very one particular productive landscape that actually supplies one particular city. If you think about it from all these basic supplies, right? I mean beforehand, we had like, you know, the Greek cities that had partnerships or exclusive partnerships or actually colonialism back in the day as well, that you're going to provide wood or you're going to provide copper and stuff like that. This could be an interesting question to go back in time. But even today, I think if you think about it, think of a city and think of the major, you know, supplies that it has. It has, you know, water, energy, food, you know, raw materials, right? Out of all these, only probably water is still somehow original, continuous, contiguous geographically, the system, the provision of water, and specific to the city, right? So you have indeed a particular aqueduct, you have the particular, you know, you know, a reservoirs and all these things that are particular to the city. Although you again have bottled water that circulates globally, right? But think of everything else, right? Think of food, for example. For food, it's impossible to actually say, I mean, even if you have a farmers market, you know, it's impossible to say that there is a particular location that just goes directly to the city. It's probably part of a system of a commodity chain of the agro-food system that circulates, you know, feed, seeds, you know, fertilizers, exactly, around. I had Carolyn still lately on the podcast about feeding cities as well, and we discussed about this, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And eventually, you know, you did a consumption point, but this is not your hinterland, it's the hinterland for every other consumer, probably in the country, probably in the world. And eventually, if you try to map those flows, they will look more like an assemblage of various operational landscapes of production, of circulation, even agglomeration landscapes where you have processing, then going back again to operational landscapes. I mean, think for example of soybeans being harvested in Brazil, then going to China. There are specific ports in China where you have the agglomeration of oil-crushing mills. So these are not outside the cities, these are in major cities, right? So you have all this import of soybeans that goes there to these bills, it's being processed. And then what happens? Is it consumed in these particular cities? No, it is actually exported again to other operational landscapes where you have this intense livestock production. And from there, you actually have these, you know, pigs or chickens being re-important, maybe even in the same cities, but even in other cities, right? So what is the hinterland now? Maybe, you know, these crossing mills, the concentration of crossing mills is actually the hinterland for these, you know, CAFOs, the concentrated animal feeding operations that are, you know, maybe in the rural area, right? So I think it's very interesting to think about it like that, like an assemblage, an assembly of landscapes, of different landscapes, that eventually, you know, you have a starting point, eventually you have a consumption point, obviously then you have a good waste, then to say, okay, look, I found this territory, that's it, you know, I pinned it down. And again, in some cases, you might be able to do it. But as a general, the general, I think, system of metabolism, it's much more complicated than that. So in a way, it's even, you know, hopeless to try to figure out exactly, you know, where does this come from? Where is the hinterland of Geneva? You know, let's map it, right? Although it's, you know, just before going to you, that's our favorite exercise. There is also, I think the, I enjoyed the thing that you said that water perhaps is the closest resource and all that. I was thinking of sand, eventually, as well as being, and then I thought, well, it's actually proportionate to the weight of the resource. You know, in terms of mass, whatever comes into the cities, water always dwarfs all of the rest. So perhaps it's normal that's the more, you know, unique place to a city, and perhaps, well, sand, crushed gravel or less, but yeah, sorry, you know, you wanted to also chime in. Yeah, no, so, Steve, your reference to transportation costs is quite relevant to this discussion. Let me just add a few layers to what Nico said, which will hopefully reinforce, but also possibly further complicate in ways that we think are necessary. So in some ways, the concept of the hinterland itself is worth meditating on for a moment, because it's still widely used as a reference point to kind of the contiguous zone outside the city that supplies the city with stuff and sometimes as a more general metaphor for everything that Nico's was just describing, like all the different supply zones, including non-contiguous supply zones. And it's interesting because there's kind of a double tendency in contemporary urban discourse from our point of view. We're actually writing a paper on this right now called the hinterland question, urban theory and the hinterland question, retrospect and prospect. So we're actually working on this right now. So on the one side, we think that there's a tendency in contemporary urban theory to marginalize or black box the hinterland question entirely. In other words, to conceive the city as self-enclosed and self-propelled and to relegate what we call the hinterland question to other fields of study, agrarian studies, studies of abstraction and resource geography, environmental studies more generally. For reasons that I think are obvious at this point in our conversation, we think that's completely problematic and that the hinterland question is actually constitutive. It's as constitutive to the urban question as is the agglomeration question. So we think of the urban question as composing precisely that dialectic between agglomeration processes and the production and transformation of non-city spaces in order to support agglomeration processes and as a result of agglomeration processes. So all that on the one side. On the other side, to the degree that the concept of, to the degree that there's a discussion of kind of non-city supply zones in contemporary urban social science, urban design more generally, the vision of the hinterland that prevails, we would argue is broadly derived from the classic Fontunan model from 1826. It's like early 19th century and it's basically this model of a relatively contiguous hinterland not particularly industrialized. There's not a lot of infrastructural transformation going on and there's a differentiation of land use according to transport costs back to the city. And that argument, that vision of the hinterland, even in Fontunan's time in 1826 was already being rapidly superseded. As we know from reading Marx and Engels, the Communist Manifesto written like two decades later, I mean if you juxtapose Fontunan, the isolated state to Marx and Engels, the Communist Manifesto, it's like completely different worlds. I mean Fontunan is theorizing something that was already superseded and Marx and Engels were theorizing something that was ongoing in their time and of course they were looking towards the future. And we think that the hinterland question, if we may call it that, that we need to understand is really the hinterland question that Marx and Engels were depicting in the Communist Manifesto. And also in the German ideology written around the same time where they used the famous formulation often misunderstood that capitalism, you know, renders obsolete the so-called idiocy as it's often mistranslated into English of rural life. And it's actually quite fundamental to this discussion because the word, I believe it's a Greek word so you guys can actually fill in the blanks here, but the word that's used in German is missed, I think it's idiot, or maybe it's idiotismus, we'd have to double check, but basically it's translated as idiocy, like literally, but what it really means, and maybe I'll just pause and ask either of you to fill in the blank of the actual Greek term, but what it actually means is the isolation. It's like the state of being isolated from broader connection to citizenship. And of course Marx, new Greek, and this is what they were meant. So the idea that they're that they're alluding to, which is quite relevant to our work on extended and planetary urbanization and the shift from hinterlands to operational landscapes, is that the rural is transformed from a more isolated zone, perhaps of agrarian production and social reproduction with associated, you know, environmental parameters to a space that's intensively connected to much broader and ultimately worldwide spatial divisions of labor. And so we pick up the queue effectively from Marx and Engels among others and then ask ourselves, what happens spatially and environmentally when previously relatively isolated or disconnected zones are intensively connected to the world economy and world ecology of capitalism? What happens spatially? And what we think happens is basically creative destruction of socio-spatial and environmental metabolic relations. So exactly the kind of mode of analysis that David Harvey famously analyzed to look at the kind of production and creative destruction of built environments within cities, we want to mobilize that same or broadly parallel analytic lens to look precisely at the non-city zones. And so this brings us to the shift from the hinterland to the operational landscape, which Nikas has already unpacked and I just want to add a little bit too. Aside from the question of where the hinterland or where the operational landscape is, in other words, Nikas very appropriately underscored the ways in which the kind of broader supply chain that supports cities, there may be contiguous zones of supply, let's say water or farmer's market or whatever, like local, you know, local stuff and localism that remains an important priority for all kinds of reasons, you know, politically and environmentally. But increasingly there's like a dispersal as it were a globalization and quotation marks of the supply chain. That's a big part of it, but equally important in our work, both past and definitely future, is that that the particular kinds of transformations that occur in these non-city spaces, these hinterlands, involve new forms of enclosure, infrastructuralization and land use intensification with associated ecological consequences, both locally and ultimately out to the planetary scale. So if you just stick with that needs to be unpacked, but in some ways the core is the idea of intensive infrastructural investment in order to increase the productivity of labor and to accelerate the circulation of capital. So it's very much of an analysis of the metabolism of capital. In Jason Moore's work, this is basically the move from appropriation to capitalization. In other words, it's a shift from, you know, appropriating so-called free gifts, which they're never free of nature, let's say from the soil or from the forest, to a system in which you actively organize and engineer that production process through mobilizing science and technology embodied in infrastructure to enhance the productivity of labor and to accelerate the circulation of capital. Sorry, I realize that's a mouthful, but those are technical formulations. And that generates a capitalization of non-city space. Effectively, an industrialized hinterland becomes an operational landscape. So it's not only that it's direction, the directionality of the flow is no longer, you know, Fontunan's vision of like the city is the market and then there's an encompassing hinterland that supplies it. So that's much more, the geometry of it is much more multi-directional and multi-nodal as Nikos's example of the soybeans going from, let's say, Argentina or Brazil to processing in China to production in China and then we export out someplace else. There's a multi-nodal circuit, but the very zones, the very niches along that circuit are themselves increasingly being industrialized, infrastructuralized and capitalized in order to, again, increase the productivity of labor, accelerate the turnover time of capital. So in this sense, just to summarize that exposition. In this sense, the concept of the hinterland that still seems to dominate popular and to some degree scholarly imagination is totally superseded by the forward motion of capital. And we need new concepts and the operational landscape as a proposal along those lines to try to grasp the remaking of non-city space, but in a way that also preserves the problem antique, the question of how those dramatic transformations of non-city spaces are articulated functionally, spatially, socially, environmentally and so forth back to processes of city building. Let me make one other point along these lines. I mean, these are big questions that we've been working on for a while and we're desperately trying to write up our ideas and it takes a little while. So alongside the operational landscape, which to some degree the way we've just been using it in this discussion refers to the kind of the supply zones broadly understood. There's also the question of the landscapes of degradation and destruction that result from unfettered fossil capitalist urbanization and different successive accumulation regimes. And this is something we're also working on in relation to questions about expulsion and surplus, the sort of expulsion of surpluses, including surplus population. But I just want to underscore this is something we need to write. We're working on some articles that deal with this issue in more systematic terms, also with collaborators like William Conroy, Salma Abu Hussein and Swarnab Ghosh at Harvard GSD, who are part of our research team on these matters. But I just want to underscore a very useful concept in that regard is actually Naomi Klein's idea of the sacrifice zone, which she doesn't systematically spatialize, but she gives lots of very important examples, some of which are actually within cities like New Orleans after Katrina or bad data in the midst of the various wars, et cetera. So the sacrifice zone here in South Chicago, there are some sacrifice zones not too far from where I'm sitting right now. So there are many geographies of sacrifice zones, but certainly to the degree that non-city spaces, whether in a demarcated way, like a waste dump, or in a broader sense to the degree that carbon is just being externalized in quotation marks into the biosphere for the last 150 years through fossil capitalist accumulation, that effectively the biosphere becomes a kind of generalized planetary sacrifice. So the oceans, the giant plastic garbage gyre floating around the Pacific Ocean and so many more locally demarcated examples of those processes. So there's a kind of, again, to use this term, a metabolic churn that takes us from hinterlands where supplies are appropriated to operational landscapes that undergo an intensive capitalization and kind of rescaling and re-territorialization of the circuits of supply, and then the churn of city building. And then the consequence of that is the production of, and really proliferation of sacrifice zones, which if you theorize this through the lens of combined and uneven development, combined and uneven spatial development over the long deray, it becomes very clear very quickly that the sacrifice zones that are churned up during one systemic cycle of accumulation effectively constitute the conditions of capital accumulation of both appropriation and capitalization and urbanization and subsequent cycles of accumulation. It's something that James O'Connor famously analyzed many years ago when he talked about the distinction between the conditions of production and the production of conditions. This is exactly the terrain that we're on. And again, Jason Moore has obviously activated that terrain in great detail as well. So all of which is to say that the concept of the operational landscape is not simply an isolated concept, but it's very much connected to some broader theoretical moves that we're trying to develop related to the analysis of planetary urbanization and extended urbanization over the long deray of capitalist development. Yeah, I had this conversation as well with Sascha Sassan and her work on extractivism and how cities leave behind that land and that air and seems, I think, because you were mentioning as well today, going from one frontier to another. I mean, it seems that we first exploit cheap labor and then go to another place for cheap labor and the same thing goes with land, right? I mean, once we have done this metabolic churn, as you mentioned, we have created that land for a well, an indefinite period of time until we economically see it viable again to re-exploit the land or something like that. I want to perhaps discuss just a bit about the power of visualizations and cartography and well, you know, data in your endeavor because even if you are or we're urban scholars, you still have a number of information that you synthesize through maps, through exhibitions, and I think this is a central pillar of your work that helps us understand your work because I also mean, even if words, even if you're very good at words, I think the maps are what most of us are here for. Could you perhaps say, a colleague of mine was saying, we had, when we were seeing the presentation of Nikos, we had a map porn presentation for 20 plus minutes or something like that, which is actually fantastic. So could you perhaps explain the importance of cartography visualizations and how to interpret and reinterpret these? Yeah, I think there are two different directions we are going, obviously they overlap. The one is actually understand out of the existing representations of urbanization what we can actually decipher about, you know, their underlying concepts, methods, geographies, limitations. So somehow explore, you know, how they help us understand the urban urbanization process in the way we want to investigate them and how they don't limit our understanding of the urban. So this is a more, let's say, analytical part of our work. It's going through existing data sets, it's going through existing efforts, it tries to dig behind their social and technical construction and decision making processes that I underpin them and all these things. And eventually, you know, understand how they are useful or not, and how we can do something different. The second area is using mostly, you know, existing sources of data to re-synthesize them and maybe represent them in ways that might not be, you know, the typical, you know, business as usual way of doing it to actually help us make all these points that we want. So we don't really do research on data, on constructing this information, but we are actually want to instrumentalize all this capacity that we have around us in a critical way and support our arguments and also help us build our arguments. So also help us understand what is really going on. And there is, of course, a risk there because we are not data scientists, for example, and we are also not, you know, graphic designers, right, or cartographers. We are somehow in between several disciplines. And the point is that what we want to do is we want to actually, you know, instrumentalize all these tools for, you know, theory building. Our goal is not to, you know, do an art project or, you know, to somehow construct a new data set, although it could be actually interesting to explore how this could be done. But at this point, our goal is to find critical ways of instrumentalizing this data with alternative visualizations in ways that would, you know, somehow complement our arguments and our theoretical propositions. Eventually, we would like to dig deeper into that, the capacities of constructing alternative, you know, classifications, maybe, of data, and alternative visualizations that would be more open to interpretation that would go more in the art domain, for example, rather than, you know, the academic one. But these are all things we are interested in exploring. But so far, I think what we have been doing is along these two lines, analyzing existing data and information and exploring alternative ways of representing them that would be complementary to our work. You know, you were actually doing both a lecture and an exhibition when you came to Melbourne for a lecture. I was there, I did half of my PhD there, so I was there. I'm curious to, that you share with us a bit, what's the impetus of having, you know, both these, your lecturing, your writing, but also the works through exhibitions, for instance, or the cartographic expression, yeah. Sure. Yeah, no, this follows exactly from that, and from what Nico's just said. I mean, for me, the core, or one of the core agendas there is, again, the critique of spatial ideology embodied in maps. There's so many maps and visualizations in circulation these days that claim to represent key aspects of the anthropocene or the urban age. The metabolic churn of data, yeah. The metabolic churn of data, but often in ways that include very important issues related to, related to the very processes that are putatively being depicted, but also related to, in some ways, the arbitrariness of the maps themselves insofar as there are often so many, so many visualizations in the age of GI science, and also just sort of remotely sense data, they generate a representation that looks self-evident, like a mimetic depiction of the real, of ground conditions, and Henri Lefebvre famously described that in a different context as the illusion of transparency. In other words, it sort of depicts space as if it's knowable and manipulable and self-evident, and our cartographic practice, again, just building off of what Nico just said, is very much oriented towards, first and foremost, destabilizing those spatial ideologies and the kind of cartographic positivism with which they're imbued, the sort of notion of this map is simply because it's generated through remotely sense data, GIS, and so forth, it's a neutral depiction of the real. So specifically in terms of some of the work that we've been doing, we've got a lot of other stuff that's kind of in slow cooking, slow cook production at the moment, but just in terms of work that we've done thus far, and just to concretize that proposition a little bit further. So the exhibition that you saw, Aristide, at Melbourne School of Design some years ago, which Nico was also, of course, involved in, like that actually began as a critique of the nighttime lights dataset. So listeners are hopefully familiar with it, and if you're not, just do a quick Google search, nighttime lights, data, and you'll immediately see an image in your Google screen of the Earth at night. I mean, it's pretty widely known. And this is often viewed and used, not just interpreted, but actually operationally deployed in urban studies as a proxy for urbanization based on the assumption that where the lights are, that's basically the cities, that's where all the people are. And so there are a lot of questions that can be posed about this, but what we did, and this was very early in the days when we first set up the Urban Theory Lab at Harvard GSD was in the context of some project-based, research-based studios, is we basically decided as an experiment to look at the putatively empty zones on the map, because based on our framework, which was, of course, just under initial development, I mean, that was almost 10 years ago, but we were skeptical about the notion of emptiness, which of course is very much a colonial cartography as well. It's a precondition and a means of imperialism is that you depict the place as empty and unused. And oftentimes that's the basis for devastating social and environmental violence. So we were skeptical about the vast swaths of the planet that appeared empty in that particular map. And so we decided to look at them. So just for example, among others, the Sahara Desert, the Amazon, the Pacific Ocean, the Himalayas, the Arctic, the Gobi Desert step, and so forth. So over a series of years, we had some research studios that used a variety of different cartographic methods and kind of counter-mapping techniques to try to effectively fill in the empty spots on the map. And as it turns out, all of those zones, without exception, are zones of intensive operationalization, even though they have relatively low populations, although that's a relative statement because the population of the Amazon is substantial, et cetera. But the point is simply that in terms of the idea that was just under development then of the operational landscape, that cartographic exercise was incredibly productive because we could begin to map and thus begin to see the kinds of land use changes, land use intensification, the new governance regimes that were being mobilized in order to accelerate and intensify export-oriented extraction, new infrastructural circuits, including logistical ones, as well as various forms of environmental waste and degradation that were in our proliferating in those zones. So that exhibition basically, we call it extreme territories of urbanization, but it basically was an attempt to radically destabilize this idea that urbanization is simply where the population's cluster. And there's more to be said about that just because oftentimes the nighttime lights dataset, the way it's used is that to the degree that lights appear in spaces where there aren't many people, they're often just deleted from the map. So Nicos has tracked these examples in great detail, as has our colleague here in Chicago, Gorga Basich. But basically an example would be like a massive zone of fracking in the US Midwest and North and South Dakota appears as kind of a flare of light that's bigger than Chicago. But the population density and size is extremely low, at least relative to a metropolis. And in many of the maps, that's just completely blended out because it's supposed to be a population-based or oriented dataset rather than actually tracking operational activities. Or another classic example that I know Nicos has a lot to say about is just squid fishing involves using lights at night in the oceans in order to fish. And so there are all these flares in the oceans. And of course, extractive operations in the North Sea that generate flares, they're completely blended out. So there's all kinds of problems with it. Let me just briefly give one other example from more recent years. So another kind of just fundamental widely circulated ideological, we would argue ideological representation of the urban is the so-called spiky world, which Richard Florida and colleagues famously constructed as a way to capture in part using the nighttime lights dataset as a way to construct their spikes. It's a very interesting exercise, actually, very important series of articles that they published both in academic journals and in more popular magazines in order to basically disaggregate GDP and make the argument that most of GDP generation is actually concentrated within large metropolitan areas. So Florida's famous argument probably 10 or 15 years ago was that it's not a flat world as Thomas Friedman was arguing in the kind of Clinton era of high globalization. It's a spiky world because economic activity is clustered within these spikes. So again, it was Nicos who came up with the idea some years ago looking at another dataset on the human appropriation of net primary production, which captures sort of agricultural productivity in the land or the potential agricultural productivity in the land to basically invert the spikes and turn them into holes. Because, of course, we think of cities and agglomerations in part as metabolic black holes because they consume primary commodities that are produced elsewhere. So Nicos inverted the spikes and turned them into holes and then a whole range of datasets related to primary commodity production, including agriculture, became, so the hinterlands became the lumps. They weren't quite spikes, but they were lumps. And this Nicos experimented with this many years ago and then eventually it turned into a larger collaborative project with the urban theory lab, the number of colleagues that we displayed in an exhibition just this past year in the Venice Biennale, which was called Data Spheres of Planetary Urbanization. So for anyone listening who also wants to track that, if you just Google Data Spheres of Planetary Urbanization, Urban Theory Lab, you'll find we produced a large video animation because of COVID. We couldn't do what we had originally envisioned in person. So we produced a video animation, which was on a very large set of screens in the exhibition hall in Venice, but you can find the video just on Vimeo, Data Spheres of Planetary Urbanization. And it basically works through in about 10 or 12 minutes that sequence of arguments where dataset by dataset, the spikes are then inverted. And to go back to the bigger picture now, the point of those exercises above and beyond scholarly discourse is to use visual techniques as a way to provoke in some ways a kind of emotional reaction, both an intellectual and an emotional and therefore also political reaction to some of the kinds of monstrous planetary transformations that we're trying to understand and to de-center the cognitive map that is kind of institutionalized through various ideological discourses and to open up other horizons for understanding, representing, and then hopefully also acting upon the kind of planetary situation in which we find ourselves. So in that sense, the visualization work that we're doing, it has a very important counter ideological function. It has a very important, as Nico has been emphasizing, very important scholarly function, but it also has a kind of political and normative function in terms of public outreach because the visualizations, like if you invert the spike and then put into stronger relief all the operations that occur within non-city space, which are occluded from contemporary urban environmental discourse, it's pretty easy to explain these kinds of ideas, including to like non-academic audiences in ways that immediately get us pretty deep into the kind of political stakes of the issues. So in that sense, that's been a really productive aspect of our method and one that we certainly want to continue to deploy both in our scholarship but also in terms of exhibitions where hopefully we'll have the opportunity to try to engage with a broader interested public audience. Just to, I think, the last point I'd like to make before we finish off is to continue on what you said, acting at the very end. And let's, if we consider cities being this endless bit of ecological surplus somehow, and given everything that we have just said, what do we do and how do we, you know, is it through multi-level governance, through each one of the challenges, so for instance, a flow feeding people and then we have a multi-level governance between the city, the country, the operational landscape or how do we act knowing all of that because I think it's a great element to rethink or given dogmas or something like that of the city and how we should actually reduce the environmental impacts. You kind of reversed engineer this whole or flipped it to its head but what do we do now with all of this? I know this is perhaps not your research but given that you have thought about it so much, I think you are the best people to kind of operationalize what you have developed. Who'd like to go first? I'm happy to take a stab at it, Nicos. Yeah, so thank you for that question, Arstit. I mean, what I would say is that we're, our primary goal in the work we've been doing thus far has not been to demarcate a quote-unquote solution or even a strategy but to suggest that and this is part of how at least I understand theory. I don't think theory can tell us the strategy or the solution. I don't think that's the work of theory but what theory can do, including this form of theoretical work that we're doing is help us understand the situation that we're in and how we got here. So it provides hopefully illuminating, although also in this case extremely disturbing, analysis of the structural parameters and of the occlusions that result from mainstream ideological approaches to the problematic, whether of urbanization, whether of energy transitions, whether of governance and so forth. And to the degree that like dominant discourses about solutions and strategies are premised on a fundamentally partial or in some ways deeply flawed understanding of the problem, the solutions are the so-called solutions are likely going to exacerbate the issues that they claim to resolve. So just to concretize that a little further and again going back to in a certain way where we begin the conversation, the dominant discourse around urban resilience and ecological urbanism, and I know it's a very diverse discourse but I would still hazard the generalization that the dominant discourse tends to focus on the need to create more efficient modes of energy use within the city. And again that's fine like I mean that's a good idea like there's no there's no problem, but that's literally the tip of the iceberg in the context of the sorts of planetary dynamics that we've described. And within the framework that we've been developing and using these last years, the dominant form of urbanization in much of the world today is parasitic in the sense that it involves intensive environmental load transfer from the non-city to the city. It's colonial in the sense that it involves degradation and disempowerment of non-city spaces also of aspects of city spaces too and so far as environmental and social injustice pervades the city, not just the city non-city relation. And it's incredibly destructive in the sense that it's premised upon the generalized extraction and consumption of fossil fuels both within the city and the non-city through primary commodity production logistics and then the various operations within the city itself. And unless we actually deal with that and the consequences of that the kind of colonial dimension which is deeply racialized, the parasitic dimension and the kind of socially and environmentally socially and environmentally destructive dimensions of the capitalist form, the fossil capitalist form of urbanization, we're really not in a position to develop an adequate strategy of repair because it can't just be repair within the city it has to be really planetary repair. And nor can we develop nor will we be in a position to really develop a model of city building unless we actually understand that city building is premised upon very distinctive relationships to non-city spaces that involve labor, infrastructure, land and metabolic you know metabolic relations to the broader web of life. So all of that is to say that our practical and political contribution is hopefully to, along with others, insert and insist upon the constitutive importance of such questions to thinking about a post-fossil and hopefully also post-capitalist form of urbanization that it's not just about, and this is very relevant for designers of course, it's not just about designing buildings and consumption and social reproduction within the city it has to really open up the broader question about the broader web of life. To some degree certain streams of the discussion around the Green New Deal in the Global North have opened up that question in very productive ways because they're really starting to analyze different scenarios for just transitions not only within the city but outside the city and of course there's a North-South dimension to that problem as well that really needs to be centered in the whole discussion just given the overwhelming responsibility of the Global North broadly construed for the kind of planetary ecological crises in which we find ourselves and the ways in which you know uneven ecological exchange North-South and along various other vectors could very easily persist or even intensify under various versions of Green capitalism that are currently being advanced. So in short the work of theory is to help clarify some of those questions and the stakes of various strategies rather than necessarily to offer a particular policy recommendation even though of course within our group and including myself we have different opinions and views about particular strategies that you know that we might advocate but in terms of what the work is ultimately trying to do it's really on the level of the very framing of the question in the hope that by refaming the question we may contribute to ongoing efforts to think about and implement more progressive and radical strategies. Nicos if you were given the keys of Athens what would you do? Well I think it's to me it's quite difficult to express because I have it in my mind as to conflicting issues. The one has to do with the obvious limitations of territorial governance and the second has to do with the big importance of space so and I think you know they are somehow contradictory because you know you might say oh space is so important then you have to actually solve this through territorial governance but actually the problem for me starts from the also it's actually an interesting time to discuss that because we had the formation of this operational landscape is actually happening with an era that you know globalization seemed to be you know a point of no return right no one would expect that we would have all these discussions now about the globalization and things like that. So you know questions of territory questions of basically outsourcing you know the negative externalities they you know they could always be somehow postponed as globalization was moving forward but actually if you look now at the discussions that we have especially around you know the green deals of various forms most of them are about internalizing right these negative externalities so you know bring the footprint back to where it is right so reducing the footprint is actually means that some of these negative externalities that a lot of them have to do with space you will have to actually have them here in your neighborhood and this is very interesting because even in the questions of renewable energy and all these new questions of competition over space that you start having now you have all these new emerging forms of Nimbism at different scales right oh yeah obviously you have to you know now have more you know winter binds but where to put them you know no one wants them especially in Europe that is so densely urbanized right so you start having all these interesting questions that on the one hand you might say that it would be a question of territorial governance and you know zoning and new forms of you know defining areas of resource extraction that are you know closer to your cities and things like that but on the other hand if you look at the planetary metabolic system actually that is now supporting these agglomeration zones that we have constructed it is so hard to imagine that you will be ever able to construct this regional localized you know even continental hinterlands that you know different people are envisioning i think it's it's no secret that the european union for example has this strategy of strategic autonomy right which sounds like self-sufficiency in whatever you can achieve right it's basically having your hinterlands where you actually have your economic interests and this creates all sorts of you know questions right because this strategic means also that you choose what you want to have here and what not and all these things and i think eventually it's hard to imagine solving these issues at you know with the territorial units of governance that we have today but it's also becoming increasingly difficult to imagine ways of generating consensus around certain topics especially now with this polarization that we have so for me one thing that would be very important would be to somehow reinvent a debate about an internationalist you know green deal or whatever you call it an internationalist metabolism because right now it seems that all the radical views of what to do with the issue are somehow exhausted with you know solving it through localizing and all these you know commodity chains and all these metabolic processes and i don't think this can really take us very far i think what would be really interesting and radical is to rethink the global system of circulation in ways that are not you know actually following you know the profit search of capitalist development and the logics of contemporary trade that are often creating very rational configurations of landscapes and assemblages of these operational landscapes actually so for me it's reinventing a bit globalization in ways that offers an alternative to the neoliberal model that we had and it's i think it's very important to do that because we saw that the critique of globalization actually ended up reinventing you know the nation state in quite unfortunate ways and you know protectionism associated with it i'm not sure it's also the way to solve questions of ecological inequality it actually seems to me right now like a conservative approach conservative not in the political way but actually you know now we have established this pattern of ecological inequality let's secure our borders to make sure this pattern doesn't get you know flipped over right so i think we really need to reinvent the global circulation of commodities the global metabolic basis of planetary urbanization and obviously localizing certain things could be one answer but actually if you look at the overall landscape of production it is for me it's very crucial to open up this discussion of alternative internationalist approaches to green deals or whatever we want to call them i think we could have said many more things i have many more questions and i want to keep this short and digestible so i'll close it here perhaps we're going to have a part two discussion sometime in the future you mentioned that for 2022 you're working on revisiting hinterlands and a bit more of the critique perhaps could you help us with some suggestions recommendations of places to look further or deeper in terms of books articles or films well i think a key reference would be obviously Jason Moore's work on capitalism in the web of life it's back from 2015 but another book that i also started reading recently i haven't finished it is the dawn of everything book by David Graeber and David Wengro and i think that it's very interesting for me because i always have this reference of you know jane Jacob's in the economy of cities and this discussion of you know city and agriculture and what happened and they actually offered quite interesting alternative that you know suggested a very non-linear way of the relationship between agriculture cities you know hunter-gatherer societies so it deconstructs somehow this quest that we often have in you know when we try to reconstruct the history of urbanization that you know we have agriculture you have the surplus and you have the city or for jane jacob you have the surplus that was coming from mining and then this created the need for agriculture and support this so i think it's a very interesting way out of this question and for me it was quite refreshing and unfortunately you know David Graeber is not with us to discuss more the contents of the book but i still found it quite interesting i mean unexpectedly interesting way to look at the history of urbanization caroline still actually also recommended that at the end so Neil do you have any suggestions or recommendations sure yeah i am fortunately i'm sitting here in my home office so i have a bunch of wonderful books right next to me so i'm just going to share a few things that happen to me on my desk but which definitely fit into this one is this wonderful book by comrade max max isle of people's green new deal and what max is doing in that in that book is really reflecting on the politics of the ongoing global debate on energy transitions and the debate on the green new deal with a particular emphasis among other things on north south divides in the context of the kind of geohistory of colonialism and empire and max isle also has a very interesting analysis of agrarian change and both the limits and the prospects of agrarian change in relation to broader planetary environmental crises that he articulates back in some very productive ways to questions about urbanization and then i'd also just mentioned this really interesting book by phil neal which i don't know if you can see it but it's called hinterland america's new landscape of class and conflict which is an absolutely fascinating analysis of the dramatic remaking of non-city spaces in the united states but also framed in a kind of global context where he does a pretty deep analysis of the proliferation of increasingly precarious labor and environmental conditions in zones either in the peri urban fringe or in in in in so-called rural areas of the united states and he also articulates that back to emergent forms of right wing authoritarianism both in the united states and beyond so he so so phil neal he's a geographer um but this is a very interesting effort to kind of connect questions of environment and labor to questions about um about politics and struggle and i'll just mention one other thing which i don't have having to have the book here but this connects up with work that i've been doing um with swanab gosh um just in the last couple of years so swanab and i have actually been going back to earlier kind of classic work by marxist evolutionary biologists and evolution and evolutionary geneticists um levins and lewanton who who wrote a very interesting book called the dialectical biologist which is and another book called biology under under i think it's biology under the influence which is um but both of them are collections of essays that they wrote as kind of you know evolutionary biologists evolutionary geneticists at harvard for many years but working within a kind of broadly marxian and strongly dialectical framework jason more builds upon their work a little bit and swanab and i have found levins and lewanton to be incredibly productive for thinking about the relationship between urbanization and broadly construed the non-human web of life and we're doing some writing on that right now but it's just to say whether you go with levins and lewanton or um i've also got um steven fogle on my desk like an important philosopher a critical theorist of nature thinking about nature whomever you're you choose it's just to underscore the the continued importance of theoretical work and theoretical clarification related to um not only urbanization but the non-human the question of nature the the ways in which we conceive such fundamental dimensions of our analysis have massive implications not only for the substance of analysis of our analysis but for um the politics of um of what we eventually argue and those matters are not settled they never will be settled and it behooves us to be critically reflexive about the underlying assumptions we're making about the urban about the non-human about capitalism itself as we do uh this kind of work well thanks so much both of you for this i think every rich uh discussion i want to thank all of the people that listened and watched until the end as well please take some time to re-watch and re-listen some parts i think the terms used we are there for a certain reason take the time to disentangle them also if you are an urban scholar urban practitioner or working in an urban administration please take the time to see how this reflects or impacts you and perhaps continue this discussion either you know in the comments or you know write an email to us or something like that i think it's a you know a point in time where we need all forces in all hands on on on deck um thanks again everyone please share it around and thanks again Nikos and Neil for this fantastic discussion Aristida thank you so much it was such a pleasure to all show me here with you thank you so much it's been a very interesting conversation and i hope we can keep it going in the future great thanks everyone and see you in two weeks with another discussion