 Hello everyone, and welcome to the Circular Metabolism Podcast, the bi-weekly meeting where we have in-depth discussions with thinkers, researchers, activists, policymakers and practitioners to better understand the metabolism of our cities, and how to reduce their environmental impact in a socially just and context-specific way. I'm your host, Aristide Ettenesides from Metabolism of Cities, and on today's episode we will talk about some original topics we haven't covered yet. We will talk about the metabolic, cyborg and post-political city. For this, we will have to provide some urban political ecology and critical slash Marxist geography foundations. To talk about these topics, I have Eric Sviggidau, professor of geography at the University of Manchester, and he has written numerous more than a hundred academic articles and books on these topics, including, in the nature of cities, urban political ecology and the politics of urban metabolism, which was co-edited with Nick Hainan and Maria Kaika. So just before keying off this episode, please everyone, if you like this podcast, just spread it around and review it positively wherever you can by telling us what you learned and liked from this episode. So now let's start with the episode. Eric, thank you very much for your time and welcome to this podcast. It's a pleasure. Could you very briefly present, or how do you generally present yourself and your work? That's not that easy. I am Eric Sviggidau, as you said, professor of geography at University of Manchester, but I had a fairly strange trajectory in the sense that I have a background in engineering, agricultural and environmental engineering, which I did with an eye towards improving the social and environmental conditions of the world's populations, particularly those who are living in very difficult circumstances. But I quickly learned that technology and science in itself would not get us there, and I increasingly moved towards considering the question of the social, the political, etc., as key ingredients in thinking through how social ecological dynamics work and how we can manage them or organize them in different ways. That very quickly took me to the critical social sciences. Once I did a Masters in Urban Planning, where I discovered at the time the critical theories of the urban people like David Harvey, Hargill Affair, etc., basically a kind of critical Marxist analysis that tried to make sense of the deep social and other inequalities that characterized everyday life both in the global north and the global south. I ended up doing my PhD in Geography with David Harvey, a quite well-known Marxist geographer, between my work for many, many, many years, and then in the 1980s, although I was originally primarily concerned with questions of technology, politics, and the transformation of capitalism in the 1970s and 1980s, by the late 1980s it became increasingly evident that the ecological condition was on the one hand not sufficiently theorized or understood, and on the other hand that the ecological condition presented itself as a sort of potential wedge and opening into acting, thinking and acting on and in the world, on and in the city in different sort of ways. So from the 1990s onwards I have increasingly worked on and still do on questions of political ecology. So I call myself a political ecologist. Basically for me, a political ecologist is someone who tries to understand the intimate articulations and relationships between the human and the non-human, the social world and the physical world, but such that the two cannot be separated out. For too long, of course, we've understood the world as being strangely organized in two hemispheres, a world called the human and a world called the non-human, and I would assume that there were all sorts of interactions between the two. And of course that is now increasingly recognized as a fallacy. And what your political ecology tries to do is to look back and look again at the world, but this time keeping the social and the physical, the human and the non-human yet together as an imbroglio that is inherently co-constituted and has to be understood in its co-constitutive configuration. And for me, so indeed I call myself an urban political ecology, but the urban really doesn't matter that much in the sense that in the sense that for me all your political economy and related to that, your political ecology is inherently urban, particularly so since the 18th, 19th century and today increasingly so. If you were to think, for example, of the political ecology of the coronavirus, that's an urban political ecology. It's the process of planetary urbanization that shaped the dynamics of this pandemic that we're still living in. So to the extent to conclude now this long introduction, to the extent that the urban or the process of urbanization has become, yeah, planetary. I mean, most people not only do, most people of the world live in cities, but that's just a stupid empirical fact. In fact, the process of urbanization now touches every nook and cranny of the Earth's social and ecological surface. And of course, the way in which the process of urbanization unfolds is deeply uneven, socio-ecologically speaking. And it's precisely that socio-ecological unevenness that characterizes the process of urbanization that I'm interested in, A and B. The reason I'm interested in examining and excavating the socio-ecological the socio-ecological archaeology of the urbanization of nature, as I call it, we may come back to that later, that for me dealing with or the politically handling the deep inequalities that of course characterize the world's urban social ecologies requires that the mechanisms of doing politics, whether that does to social movements or social activism or by other means, has to primarily focus on the dynamics of that socio-ecological process. Yeah, well, you summarized everything so well, it's tough to keep up with a good question now. So I'm wondering, I had this idea, so I had written down, I'm glad that you were mentioning this, your trajectory or your research, how you went from the agriculture engineering to urban planning and then to political elements of urban planning, let's say, or the politics of urban planning. And I'm wondering, you said very rapidly you realize technology is not going to make the cut. This generally takes us decades to figure this out, how did you very early on considered or realize that, well, engineering is just part of the challenge, especially that we're taught as engineers that we're dealing with issues, right, and we're finding solutions, that's our job. How did you came across that so early on? Well, it was a strange coincidence, so to speak. Of course, I grew up in the 1970s. I gained my political consciousness as well as my academic understanding in the 1970s, that context matters, of course, massively. I grew up as a teenage activist, as so many others on primarily ecological and environmental issues. So at the time, the 1970s living in Belgium, the nuclear energy conundrum was the sort of pivotal terrain through which environmental action was organized, and which was basically the foundation of what we would today call the environmental movement. That's where it found its roots. So I get extremely concerned and upset that some environmentalists today put today nuclear energy as a solution for our climate problems. So that is one of the great contradictions and paradoxes of our times. In any case, at the same time, I was heavily involved in other forms of political and social action. But for a number of contextual reasons, I was groomed to be an engineer, because engineering, given the cultural and social context I came from, I was the first one in my family ever to go to university and becoming an engineer was the sort of dream scenario. And given my interest in ecological affairs, I did think that of course that would be a good trajectory if I were to continue to work on questions of ecological sensible development with an eye towards the deep injustices or dealing with the deep injustices that I could see everywhere around me. And I still think of course that technology really matters. But it became clear after four or five years of long study that although technology is absolutely vital, obviously that the way in which the sort of modernist idea of technological progress that would solve the world's problems as well as elevate everyone in the world to a higher level of development was just a fantasy. A fantasy sustained by very particular political and economic interest and to serve very particular sort of objectives. I did at the time not have the words and the knowledge to frame that, but I could sense it. And of course, when I discovered as a student activist at university, the work of Marx, reading Capital Volume 1, etc., it was increasingly evident that a critical political economic analysis helped me to understand why this modern dream of technologically progress in the interest of all quickly descends into this combined and uneven development whereby some people get thrashed while others are suffering precisely because of the thriving of others that I became interested in the political the questions and that I felt the urgent need to deepen there. And that combined with the deep interest in the question of the urban given the rapid process of urbanization whereby I saw both the origin of the socio-ecological inequalities as well as the solutions consequently in how the urban environment was being thought about and how the urban environment was managed. And that that combination drove me ultimately to becoming a political ecologist. Ultimately, ultimately, the key point to conclude this, the key point is that I have been always been concerned with questions of your political inequality, social inequality, and it was that concern that drove my search for appropriate epistemological and theoretical and empirical perspectives that would guide my academic research. So it's not theory that drove me to the concern with question of socio-ecological inequality that drove me to explore a particular set of theoretical and empirical concerns that I would argue, still would argue, among the key perspectives that we need to consider if we want to take seriously the profound socio-ecological inequalities that characterize our contemporary world. Yeah. And then you, so you did your master in urban studies and then you did your PhD with David Harvey on. If I understand correctly, is the production of new spaces of production, was that like a... That was the title of my PhD, yes. Yeah. Was that like a remembrance of Henri Lefebvre's work on the production of... Yeah. But did you actually look at who makes the space or who is it manufacturing? Is it the politics? How do you... What did you look at? Yeah. So in a nutshell, this... I was doing my PhD in the early 80s, 1980s, at the time of profound, profound political economic change. We've just gone to this massive wave of deindustrialization with devastating consequences, of course, for the social fabric in what we now call old industrial regions, while at the same time, we did see what again was imagined as a purely technological shift to what we would today call the high tech, what was then called actually the high technology in the high technology, with today we would call the IT sector, the Silicon Valley phenomena, which was characterized by a completely different set of social relations, work relations, geographies of production and geographies of consumption, and different political embeddings of these new technological forms of organization. So I was interested in the political dynamics and the social struggle dynamics that will integral to the process of this transition from what I called, together with many, many others at the time, one regime of accumulation to another regime of accumulation, very much based on the French regulation school that argues that every social system is a combination of a particular dominant forms of sociotechnical organization, like assembly lines, mass production, etc., in the post-war period to niche specialist high tech-based production flexible systems in the 1980s, 1990s, that these shifts were always also parallel by profound changes in the way in which the political configuration was socially embedding or socially regulating these kind of processes. So I was particularly concerned with how just to name a few, the process of financialization, the deregulation of the international financial system, the deregulation of the welfare state, of collective bargaining, the classic year 20th century forms of regulating and organizing capital labor relationships, how they were rapidly changing as a result of a shift in class dynamics, the increasing force of the capitalist class in the 1980s, that would be extremely successful in pushing through what today we would call neoliberalization and which has now become a fully embedded dogma, so to speak, that cannot even longer be fundamentally a question. So my PhD in a nutshell was about historical, geographical, the political and economic dynamics of historical geographical shifts in the technical mode of organizing your production on the one hand and its social embedding in particular governance regimes and forms of organizing the capital labor relationship. And through that, of course, new spaces of production emerged, like the Silicon Valleys, the side of France and the new spaces of high tech production, while others would would have declined this integrate and the industrialized. So I was interested in that seesawing dynamics of historical geographical change, animated by the specific dynamics of capitalism at a given time in a particular environment. And this, so I think, of course, many of your work is influenced by, let's say this vocabulary that you use, it could be the Marxist political vocabulary, we talk about production, we talk about means of production, we talk about workers, labor, well, and then there is the geography part of it. And so it's really this intersection, what is the space of a production? Yes, but it's more than an intersection. There had been a long history, whereby we understood the geographical organization of the world as a result of social, technical, political, or other processes. So space was just a container and the effects of basically social processes. We disagree with that and it's now, I think, firmly established. So what I try to argue in my PhD, together with many others at the time, was that the geographical is a key active moment in the making of social processes. And today, I think we can even push that further. At the time, we were primarily interested in a concern with space as a social, cultural, political condition. Today, of course, it is the very physicality of space that has become much more foregrounded and how the very physicality, the non-human configurations combined with human become active moments, as we call active moments in the way in which social ecological systems change. So this kind of brings forward the question, whenever you talk about the city, well, there is so many elements that are embodied in this. Yeah. How do you even start by defining a city or do you even bother defining a city before explaining something? Are there any postulates that you, guiding postulates that you start with? Or how do you teach this? Or how do you read? Yeah, you write about this? Yes, yes. That's a very good question. So I'm not particularly interested in the endless debate of what constitutes a city. I'm actually not particularly interested in either defining the city or in the city per se. And I understand the city here as this gigantic accumulation of human and non-human stuff, which goes from cities like Manchester or Amsterdam, concentrations of transformed matter. This is transformed matter that is concentrated in a particular geographical environment. And alongside with that, and as an integral part of that, a massive concentration of people in there too. But I'm interested in the process to which the urban become constituted. So what concerns me is the process of urbanization that is the process through which human and non-human stuff gets together, is combined together, forms an assemblage, a cyborg, whatever you want to call it, a constellation, as Matthew Gandhi would often call it, a constellation of human and non-human stuff that comes together, is assembled together in a very specific, very concrete and historically changing and often contingent sort of ways. So New York is not, Lausanne is not, Hanoi is not, Shanghai, but nonetheless there are a set of key processes that shape and drive the process of urbanization. On the one hand, on the other hand, what makes the urban, again I prefer the urban rather than the city, the urban is for me also an absolutely central space of your politicization. That it is historically, geographically, it's not that difficult to see how it is the urban through which the political movements emerge, made themselves public and fought for forms of your political transformation that could move the system towards more just or equal configuration. If you think of the working class struggle, the feminist struggle, most of the ecological struggle that actually works articulates and operates through the urban. So for me, and that goes back to almost the classic Greek agora, so urban space, urban public space has always been the key terrain through which your politicization emerges and is enacted and occasionally leads to forms of political change and transformation. So in that sense, for me, the urban is also vital. It is for me the eminent space of politicization. Yeah, we'll come back later on the politicization and depolitization or appolitization of cities. I'm wondering, so you said that the last phase, so in the 90s or 80s was your shift into political ecology, let's say, where you really went from space to the questioning of flows and who is affected by the flows, how other flows are articulated and generated by human activities, I guess. Was there already a discipline of urban political ecology? How does this sphere started back in the day? Yes, yes. So by the early 80s and increasingly so by the late 80s, there was not only in academia, but also in the wider political sphere, an extraordinary critique and attack on certain forms of radical political thinking, in particular, mylicism, also the collapse of the welfare state system in the West, the disintegration of the really existing socialism in the East, the rise of what was then called post-modernist perspectives, etc., lounged this wholesale critique on mylicist thinking both theoretically as well as strategically. And that led to a proliferation of all sorts of other critical perspectives, post-modernist, post-structuralist, post-colonial, etc., many of which are very important and very interesting. I do not want to critique that, although I think some of them are very problematic, but interesting insights do emerge from it. I did not want to go that way because although I could fully recognize some of the inherent weaknesses in the way in which Marxist theory and certainly its politics had unfolded in the 19th and 20th century, I was a lot more concerned with and interested in trying to reformulate it and through that push it forward. And it's true, of course, that the ecological question had never been very high on the Marxist political agenda in the 20th century. There is no doubt about that, although I would argue it is yet present in 19th century original Marxist thinking is there, but it completely disappeared both in theory and certainly in practice through the 20th century. But I was convinced that it would be possible to reformulate it and I thought it was absolutely vital to bring the non-human, the ecological, the non-human into social theory precisely because the dynamics of the environment became, on the one hand, increasingly more diplomatic. The environmental ecological issue pushed itself increasingly higher on the social and political agenda. It was a real concern for a growing number of people, A and B, there were, of course, many quite influential and important emerging environmental movements which I and many others did consider as possible new political agents and political actors that could move in a direction that would shift, however slightly or in a bigger way, the existing capitalist social ecological configuration. So that is where I wanted to go. Of course geography to now speak of the discipline where I was working in at University of Oxford at the time historically geography had always been the discipline that tries to combine social and physical affairs but had done so for a long time in extremely problematic ways. Of course in a very empirical sometimes problematic theoretical ways but it had always been a concern among geographers of how the environmental configuration worked. So it was a natural environment to start thinking again in this way although using electrically different tools. So I was doing something really quite simple I think. I mean I had been a PhD student of David Harvey and David Harvey understands, it's very much rooted in mylexism, understands urbanization as being structured in and through the circulation of money and the self expansion of value in the dynamics of capital accumulation. Let's call it economic growth. That economic growth in a particular social and political dynamics that underpin the dynamic of economic growth are absolutely vital, absolutely vital to understand not just urbanization but understand the wider functioning of the combined and uneven development that characterizes capitalism. What I was trying to do was just to look at the associated flow. David Harvey was looking for money to capital that way and how it circulates and I think well what happens if I take let's say H2O water and I follow the flow in the opposite direction and see how the non-human becomes is a necessary active and key ingredient in the way in which this circulation process is organized and I was very lucky in a way to see a series of accidents as life goes. I ended up in Ecuador in a big project that lasted for four years, spent altogether two and a half, three years in Ecuador. Precisely at the time that David Harvey and I and many of his students and others were beginning to think through and what would later be called geopolitical ecology and there had been some emerging world in the 1970s and the 1980s but not very much but there was some just to single a few out. There's Michael Watts silent violence about famine, a set of classic political ecological study that is Blakey's classic study on soil degradation, soil erosion from a politically ecological perspective. There was some work done in the 1970s as well but to cut a long story short the first day I arrived in Ecuador but I've never been in my life. My friends as happens you know you're live in a city you don't know to start this your project. I had friends and colleagues there who had already been there working for several months and the first day I arrived they took me on a tour of the city. That's what geographers do. Of course that's what geographers do. We generally look at infrastructures but yeah it's the same. It's the same thing. So the whole day, the whole day my very good friend in the Jeep going from place to place neighborhood to neighborhood explaining me all sort of things what he would do in the project or the city looked like etc. I was massively jet lagged because I just arrived. By five six o'clock in the afternoon I was exhausted and my friend a western male took me on top of a hill you know the classic male gaze to look at the city sort of thing you know at the end of the day you know let's now have the master's view. Exactly with a drink and a cigarette and then say what the plan of the city should be. Exactly so my very enthusiastic friend on the top of the hill was going over the city. I was not paying much attention any longer by that time. I was sitting down exhausted and I was looking what was going on at the foot of the hill and at the foot of the hill there were these dozens and dozens of blue your trucks all more or less similar driving up and down and it was sort of interesting. I thought what are these trucks doing down there right. So I interrupted my friend I said what's what's going on down there so he looked down the hill and he said they're selling water and he continued with this narrative on the city and I thought selling water what the heck you know so I stopped him again I said can you tell me a bit about this selling water business thing so he then explained to me what the condition of the city was in terms of access to water that 35 percent of the urban population 600,000 people in a in a in a city small city of 2 million people had no access to piped potable water and consequently in order to get access to their needs for water they would buy it from the truck so it would go from house to house and and sell it basically fill up tankers and these these tanker wagons would would would would be filled up by water from the water system and then sell it like one would sell ice cream door to door in the neighborhoods where where there was no access to water and at the cost that was gigantic so water I quickly found out was one of the most hotly contested but socially and political domains the terrains in the urban configuration it was one of the of the elements around which continues social contestation your political action etc unfold so that's when I decided basically that that is what I was going to work on in a follow the blue trucks yeah follow the blue trucks so I had been thinking for two or three years in a theoretical in a theoretical sense about this nature society configuration and here I I I I decided to try to put some empirical substantiation on my theoretical musings by looking at the circulation of water basically and I start the next day I started following trucks so you became a a metabolic investigator was it in the way I kill you while I kill Ecuador I literally became a metabolic investigator I literally did that both both historically so I I dived into the archives that's accepted to understand the making of this highly uneven and unequal system of access to water I quickly discovered that that was the standard condition for most people living in cities in the global south and that was a problem of global concern that so many people do not and still do not have access to sufficient qualities sufficient quantities of water of sufficient equality in fact absence of access to water is the number one cause of premature mortality and in cities there is there is no alternative you can't dig about easily in the countryside you can and cities are dependent on water being brought in somehow somewhere so basically that's that's what I did I followed the historical and geographical circulation and metabolism of H2O from its source where it was extracted to the moment it was discarded as wastewater but I did not do that in the way in which most systems analysis would do that is to follow things from one place to the other sort of stupid so circulation I was interested in the social the cultural and political embodiment of the metabolic vehicles the pipes the trucks the machines etc through which water became pumped up transformed by adding things to subtracting things to do it how that then and inserted water in halls and whole legal configuration of ownership and non ownership of pricing etc of technologies of a variety of kinds and how at each and every one of those moments the circulatory metabolism the work that I usually use it's first about circulation but in the circulation it changes it changes both in its physical that is biochemical characteristic but also at the same time changes in terms of cultural significance its social power relationships that are embedded in it and its economic configuration so it's basically that that got me going empirically speaking as a urban quote unquote your political ecologist but I was not again not particularly interested in Guayaquil as a city per se but really how the way in which water became urbanized was structured in and through your processes that were not just local although they meant to do but was embedded in fact in regional national and indeed global the processes of metabolic circulation just to give a simple illustration of that the first public waterworks in Guayaquil were built in 1902 and the capital just to cut a very long story short the capital required to build this new infrastructure came from the mass export of cocoa chocolate so actually the socio ecological transformation of Ecuador in the direction of cocoa based plantations geared at export of cocoa for the chocolate eaters of Belgium and Switzerland and Spain etc at the same time resulted in the movement of capital and money that made it possible to urbanize local waters so these sort of interactions that were multi-scaled but always structured through dynamics of metabolic circulatory change is what I was interested in and that ended up in this book on Guayaquil in 2004 it's funny because I think the first time I started reading about urban metabolism is 10 years or so ago and and you know I came from a engineering point of view so I was looking at numbers yes and then I think you know works like yours works like Matthew Gandhi's had you you clearly had in the title urban metabolism yet it didn't resemble at all with everything else I was reading no I understand yeah and it it kind of puzzled me for a long time to to to accept that actually one metaphor can be used by many people for different urban phenomena which is which is the the strength and the bane of this field or subfield or however we want to talk about it yeah but that's ask I'm wondering because you started in the 70s 80s 90s to work on this field similarly at the same time was let's say that the birth of industrial ecology and the people that account stuff yes and I'm wondering so in your work you generally cite as well Marina Fischer-Kowalski and her how she read Marx and the capital and how she situates the metaphor of metabolism we also had Marina on the podcast I'm wondering how and whether you collaborated with this other sphere of people who actually did more or less the same thing as you but I don't think they did more or less the same thing as us at all they did something radically different they were using the same metaphor to try to capture that is true your metabolism they use the same metaphor but I would argue they were doing something radically radically different do not I mean for us as I said in the beginning our concern was your political transformation yeah correct in a radical sort of way that is how can we move towards towards a more democratically equitable and socially inclusive and ecologically sensible local national international configuration that was what drives us that was not the case for Fischer-Kowalski and her correct way of that was a much more positivist neutral type of science that has that was quite consciously apolitical or non-depolitical I've nothing against it but it's something very very very different uh so on what industrial ecology does and particularly Fischer-Kowalski and her team and impact and it's quite significant it's a really really important work I've used it myself many many times I think extremely useful I don't don't have anything against numbers and data but she does strange things there's two strange things that she does and not just she I name her as a representative of a particular way of understanding your metabolism and working your metabolism but in her analysis of the historiography of metabolism she is acutely aware of the origin of metabolism in marxist thinking and orderly critical thinking of the 19th century and she's acutely aware in her writings how the thinking about the metabolism at the time was was very very sensitive to how we should understand metabolism not merely as a biological or biochemical by a physically processed but that that the metabolism was also at the same time shaped by the relations of ownership non-ownership by by the state by forms of regulation etc when when she then started to look at the 20th century the study the understanding of metabolism became utterly and completely socially and politically disembodied it moves from understanding it as a as a relational reconstituted dynamic to the movement one would see on a Bill Gates input output spreadsheet yeah yeah so it became solely the study the empirical study of the movement of matter from place to place and how in that movement matter would take on different technical chemical ecological biochemical configurations now I thought that this kind of empiricist and positivist input output flow that industrial ecologists take as their terrain I find that very interesting because it gives us your cues a clues as to what needs to be understood yeah the flow that they give me numbers from is absolutely vital because they tell me that has to be understood explained and accounted for yeah itself it's meaningless it is it is trivial it is it is it is it is it is unimportant uh in terms of of of understanding and consequently in terms of grappling with the dynamics that shape this kind of industrial ecology so in in other words what what they consider to be the explanation for me is what needs to be explained so I think it's the vehicle that it's exactly so don't tell me that you don't do the same thing but do something very very no no I think you were using the same vehicle for different reasons and I think today well there is also this political industrial ecology field that starts very wobbly to exist with some case studies not sufficient yes yeah and I think that that is also in in what you said previously how technology and technique is not what is going to solve the problems it's the same thing with now we realize more and more studies of measuring flows now say okay is this just or is this uh you know can we stay within the limit and if we stay within the limits how does that affect everyone and all of that so I think now we because of external constraints the questions are converging perhaps not um going to the full potential of saying what is the political and the policies and the you know classes behind it and the the production who owns the production chains so over there I think there is a lot of education still to be cross-pollinated but yeah well it's not just about cross-pollination although that matters obviously but for people like me how can you begin to begin to understand the fundamental configurations of metabolic transformation without considering ownership non-ownership the becoming of ownership the legal and institutional embedding of ownership how can you begin to say something let's say about electrical vehicles without looking at the extraordinary struggle and conflict over owning lithium mines in Chile or or elsewhere how can you say something about the industrial ecology of the mobile phone uh with her considering the ownership and the gigantic struggle over coltan mines in central africa now that for me is is is is is is worse than meaningless this is post-truth science because those so-called the critical or more the critical industrial ecologists they do know that has to do with ownership they do know it has to do with the class the relationship of who owns nature and who organizes who has the power to organize the circulatory metabolic flow etc they know that they do not say what they know therefore they're actually to a certain extent lying to themselves because they know the truth do not speak the truth and that's what I would argue today is what defines a post-truth science and I would indeed argue that much of the science that many of us do in the environmental field is post-truth science and this is why do you think so is it because there is just 8 000 words in an article and you cannot have asterisks and notabene everywhere is it because of different conceptions of science different conceptions of what is the role of a researcher what do you think is behind this so certainly everything that that we say matters the way people understand science the conception they have of science the place they scribe to science and provided divisions of labor etc all matter in terms of of of of of deciding what to say as an academic and what not to say what should be said and what should not be said so yes and and and usually these different ways of trying to understand a grapple with metabolism say or accounted for and explained by the participants in terms of epistemological ontological theoretical choices and views they have and and and that is that is perfectly fine of course that is the modern fine there should be a thousand flowers that bloom without a certain problematic that we all know needs to be taken seriously having said that I do think there's something more at work in this in this disavowal so to speak it's what I together many psychoanalysts calls a fetishistic disavowal which basically stands in on means that despite the fact we know very well what the facts are and what constitutes the facts we act on the case of academics we write as if we do not know what these facts are and there's a whole wide range of reasons that need to be considered in order to understand that it has to do among others with organization of the political economy of academia it has to do with organizing the political economy of financing science it has to do with the political economy and the and the culture of of hiring and firing academics who is entitled to be an academic and who decides who is an academic I've been extremely lucky in my own career that I hit on a number of privileged interlocutors who were sympathetic and supported my view of thinking many of my generation my type failed yeah they were excluded from and to be absolutely honest in my 40 year academic career I have received funding of all manner of organization including the European Union lots of I got lots of money from the European Union over the years mainly to do ecological social ecological work on almost every single one of my applications I have lied of what I'm gonna do I lied yeah I think and I do think that most academics know precisely what I'm talking about very few dare to admit that what they are saying they want to do and and explain to be as vitally important for the well-being of science and and the world they know they're lying because they write this down in order to maximize those chances to get funding you know they're trying to imagine trying to imagine what the master discourse is the master narrative is so every single academic research project application that I have done was a post-truth application now I often sit I often sit also on the other side of the table for the research councils locally nationally internationally etc which I enjoy doing because I think it's important and I can see the post-truths content dripping from it and yeah so I think it's a bit more complicated than just a choice of different conceptual epistemological ontological framings I have not much difficulty with that in fact that should be nurtured different ways of trying to understand just a grapple with something that we do not know but that should be looked at that should not take the place of a critical analysis of the academic the place and the role of academia research and universities in the present conjunction which which which which nurtures particular ways of understanding particular ways of knowing nurtures that by the motions research money and all manner of other things and at the same time is adequately disavows marginalizes or makes it more difficult for other views to be heard and said and that is vitally important and that I think is that tension that nurtures a the regime in which post-truth science has become the hegemonic norm and the people like me there are many like me I'm not by a long way the only one luckily plenty plenty of people like me but it's a minority still which is really strange I think given how many academics that are working on environmental and ecological affairs the number of people that look at a range of perspectives that I also adhere to is marginal and their effect is non-existent for very very understandable reasons who would want to change the system hey exactly exactly exactly but if we do not want to which is fine which is fine that's not my concern that which is fine one of course does not have to want to change the system that is fine what what what what I find really yet troubling is not the voice of those who say I don't want to change the system that's fine if that is their position but I'm much more concerned with or I find really problematic is all those who say the world is in serious environment is in a serious environmental conditions if we continue doing what we're doing there are going to be serious and now well documented ecological and consequently social implications the climate change is the classic of that kind and and there's therefore a consensus actually among most environmentalists etc that urgent action is needed otherwise they're going to be a disaster and 80% says and we can solve that by technical institutional means that do not have to change the system that's a lie cannot be done that's a lie that is opposed to the lie and most of those do know it cannot be done through these technical means nonetheless they keep on insisting that it is even the word degrowth has now come into the environmental parliament I've come across that yes this is good this is good who knows where we're gonna end up so I think this is a good segue to discuss about post politics in in cities yes so I remember where when back in the day you were talking about a politics in cities so how we were we were asking ourselves or cities and urban administration were asking us not whether we wanted the stadium but what color would we like the stadium is it red or is it blue yeah but now you've you're you're talking about post politics what is talk to us about this post politics cities yes yes over the past 20 years or so there has been a growing awareness and I think a widely shared consensus that the people are losing interest in the question of politics they don't do not get trust politicians any longer that is the rise of all the populist usually right wing movement etc which are all signs of a deep concern of and distrust by the people the average person of the political machinery there's also a very well documented decline related to what I just said in the participation of citizens in your political the processes even the simple process of voting for most people are not any longer interested in it so political participation is going down rapidly and is generally perceived as problematic in a certain way the disappearance of the political concerned citizen now what I'm interested in and those who mobilize a term of post-eublitalization they try to account for that disappearance of the political in the expression of and in the everyday life of people so the argument here is that over the past 20 or 30 years or so a moment more or less coinciding with the rise a subsequent subsequent consolidation of neoliberalism whereby a particular a particular form of appropriating nature a particular form of metabolizing nature and a particular form of distributing the products of that nature is is is is is is is is is is is common sensually and unquestioned will be structured by the market and the private sector so is the private sector the market economy that is the key mechanism through which the transformation of nature and allocation of interest and services should should be organized there's no alternative to that So, A, and B, to the extent that issues, your problems are recognized, like for example financial crisis is a serious problem, the refugee crisis, serious problem, we call it a crisis, the climate crisis, serious problem, the COVID crisis, serious problem, etc. So, although it's fully recognized that there are all sorts of issues and problems around, they will usually, and in a dominant way, argue that they can be handled by technical managerial manners. So, A, a combination of technological change and innovation and institutional adaptation will provide us with a configuration that will lead to managing or dealing with the situation that we live in. That is what I call post politics. Post politics is the combination of consensus making about something, refugees or the problem, the climate is the problem, the consensus about that, no one disagrees with that, or very few. That this consensually established your problem that can be dealt with by a combination of technical and managerial institutional configurations. Now, the underlying assumption of that, of course, is that society cannot be changed, we can only change the institutional and technical configurations. So, it's what I call technical managerialism. So, most of the problems are dealt with by technical managerial configurations, in which the public, to the extent that they're invited to participate, and they are often invited to participate, they can choose the color blue or red, etc. So, you can't question the framing of the problem and the trajectory of the solutions that are proposed, you can deal with minor technical and institutional adjustments to participation, the framing cannot be done. So, it's what the French, once upon a time called la pensée unique, there is a unitary way of doing things. So, that system, such a consensual system, announces the end of the political. So, when I, when we say that post your politicization as a form of technical managerial management signals a process of deep politicization. The question then is what is being the politicized, or in other words, what is being often forgotten is how we conceive of the political. And that is the key issue. The disappearance of the political whereby we understand the political as the signal of radical disagreement that cuts to the social. In other words, in that sense, the political is precisely what the democratic recognized that people disagree. That they disagree that are heterogeneous views positions, etc. And the democratic, the political insist. And it does so without any foundation the democratic, the political insist that we're all equal. Radically heterogeneous wishes desires views, etc. So this techno managerial post politicization radically undermines the very very architecture and principle of the democratic. And again, it's very important to understand the difference between the democratic as the expression, the egalitarian expression of disagreement. And to distinguish that some democracy as the instituted forms of rulemaking and management, etc. So the political is not something that unfolds in parliament or council chambers, etc. That's politics. We understand politics. The French have a beautiful, such a beautifully gendered language. So the instituted forms of managing public affairs they call la politique. And the Spanish call it la politica. The political as the expression of egalitarian disagreement. The French call low political, the Spanish low political. The political has increasingly disappeared has been disavowed has been marginalized has been sidetracked to such an extent that these days the notion of the political as a democratic procedure is not any longer recognized. Precisely this, this erosion of the democratic. We argue that leads to a disintegration of the belief and the importance of politics by average citizens which drives them into the hands of populist. And then between nationalists that leads to the, the politicization in which many academics contribute to further sustaining this deep politicized configuration. But this deep politicized configuration that characterizes urban policy but also environmental policy. And only one thing can be done in order to secure the future of Los on, it has to be a sustainable competitive city, just like Amsterdam Manchester, yeah, and you, and you develop a sustainable competitive city through a particular set of managerial and technical interventions that articulate with the supreme power of private capital and the free circulation of capital, etc. There's no way to get vehicles to do which to do it and there's no alternative. Yeah, if you think there's an alternative you're either an idiot, a child, or you've forgotten that the 20th century is forever over. Now. Now, the political as the expression of this agreement cannot be suppressed the whole time, particularly in a configuration. The political configuration, whereby social and other inequalities, social class gender and other inequalities, or not only their, their deepening, they're getting worse both at a local scale as well as on the transnational scale. Now, here we have a great paradox, the culture of neoliberalism says we're all equal, we're all free to do whatever we want yet that very, the practice of neoliberalism produces increasingly greater inequality and in egalitarian heterogeneity in egalitarian heterogeneity that then leads to a situation in which under post your political conditions, the political returns in the form of violent outbursts or radical outbursts of discontent. Now, we've seen over the past 10 years, both in a positive sense, but also in a negative sense, the emergence as an urban phenomenon to have all manner of radical discontent and radical disagreement in the end. Again, the outrage in Greece, the Occupy move, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, sometimes very successful. Look what happened yesterday in Chile, with the presidential election of the two years of intense urban struggle of politicizing sometimes that's positive effects in any case, these uprisings, these, these manifestations of radical discontent of which extinction rebellion and youth, the climate or other expression, so to speak, or a signal for me of the failure of this post political cozy consensus. The problem now is that the reemergence of the political in the form of those, those outbursts of discontent or disagreement are not sufficiently leading to sustained political action and organization capable of changing, however minimally the social ecological conditions of our cities and beyond. That in a nutshell is what I, what I am my colleagues understand by post depoliticization and how it helps us to understand what happens in cities what happens, helps to understand what happens with the environment, and what helps us to understand the emerges of new forms of discontent, both on the progressive side, but also on the regressive more popular side. So, perhaps then to, to conclude what we learned and what you learned, how do you act then how do you guide action through, through knowing how intertwined so with the global local elements. The frame that you have put as well. Well, given the case studies, the flows, the, how would you move forward in this element. Yes, yes. It depends of course very much who I am speaking to. Because the audience that you speak to usually has already a view as to how to proceed. Let me, since we're talking about your metabolism and urban metabolism, let's take that as, as the, as the vehicle. So, social change does not take place on podcast or through podcasts or libraries. Unfortunately. Yeah. Unfortunately, but yeah. Have been good. Yeah. But they do matter now that you know what I would do what you're doing if we thought it was completely irrelevant what you do. So, the point I really want to make is that dynamics of social and ecological change, this idea action of a particular kind of political action or come in a moment to what I mean by your political action, is the forms of action. So, that means that, first of all, one has to radically reject forms of action that are being defended as potential solutions to a serious issue. And displays those on the terrain of the political instead, let me exemplify that. There is a great consensus that forms of individual and sometimes the collective intervention might help with the social ecological condition the city is in my preferred example is here is the combination of recycling, flying, increasing the ethical awareness of people to change the individual behavior, and many people you believe that this is vital to change the coordinates of the social ecological system. Not to know it's a lie. What I was doing is we just not a plea for not recycling, etc. Of course, that's not what I'm saying I do that too. Yeah, I try to be a good ecological citizen, but I have absolutely no. And I can, I can demonstrate that to believe that that would contribute to transforming society and then on a more collective level, the technological fix. I think that the electrical vehicles or seem to be talked about as the ecological panacea for for cities, the world around. And I think that's a lie. That's a lie a there's not enough electricity to power all these electrical vehicles to the place in terms of the combustion engines, and what are you going to do with the with the social ecological pollution that is taking place all around the world to reduce the resource to get the resources to get electrical vehicles go so we should stop with seeing the technological as the panacea. There's no extension there for I would argue the problem of the climate is not see or to a methane. It's somewhere else. See or to greenhouse gases or the symptom. Of a condition. It is not the alpha and the omega same interested in H2O water as as I am if you want to change the problematic, highly uneven and literally genocidal form in which we organize the circulatory metabolism of water we should stop talking about water. Stop talking about water that's not my issue is. So that's step number one. Yeah, to really determine most of the assumptions that most of the people and critically accept that individual behavior change combined with technical managerial transformations will deal with the problem. It will not. It will not. Yeah, but it's easy to think that. So that's number one. Number two, then is to is to think and act the politically. Political acting is something that always happens in common. You don't do that alone. That is a collective. The process which unfolds in public space. It is visible. It's a performance. It's like a theatrical performance in the street in the square, etc. So the nurturing the participation and the further mobilization of forms of public acting in space is absolutely vital. Number two, number three, that this means cutting through individualistic and an identity in arrangements and produce a collective, albeit heterogeneous, the collective that acts in the name of equality, democratic equality, number three, number three. Number four, number four, then think about how to sustain that so that it becomes effective in beginning to change, however small, the institutional and technological architecture, because that is what is needed. The mental change of that. That is what needs to be done. Now that is difficult. That is not always self self evident. It's actually often very dangerous because we do know that if that form of acting unfolds in space, the powers that be will come down. They are successful, but occasionally they are. And again, I would argue that that our, our urban histories demonstrate that you know what the forms of Italian, the political acting historically, but we can learn from the past. Sometimes all successful think of the successes of the labor movement, the feminist movement, the African American civil rights movement, they all share the same base configuration principles that I just outlined. Each time about egalitarian inclusion and how to do these demands and mobilizing the power of the multitude. One began to change the institutional configuration for the better. That is what is needed. So on the one hand we should stop doing what we're doing. As intellectuals that and to start thinking about what we do know is absolutely vital. That is the political procedure to which social institutional and consequently ecological change is animated. That is the only hope. Otherwise we should forget about it. Yeah, forget about it. Yeah. Finally, on what to do is to give up on our fantasies. Much of all of them. No, no, no, no, no, no. Well, no, some, some have to be fully, fully endorsed. No, no, no. Some of the dominant fantasies that legitimize why we should do something about the urban environmental that's conditioned. Why? Why are so many people concerned about this in a variety of ways from deep sea of the radical thinking to engineering and everyone else. Why do we feel we need to do that? What is the legitimizing foundation for this. Now I would argue there are two key arguments that underpin the legitimacy of social environmental action. The first is, if we do not do something now, there might be really serious difficulties and problems coming in the future, the kind of apocalyptic imaginary or the dystopian imaginary, which means that there is a dystopian future coming, but it can still be avoided. It's a lie. Half the world's population already lives in the dystopian socio-ecological condition. They are already there. It's too late. So there's a particular fantasy sustained by a particular ideology and view of an apocalypse to come in the future. And for many people in the world, the apocalypse is already there. And if you start looking at the urban ecological, socio-ecological condition from a perspective that for a serious part of the population is already too late, or they are already suffering seriously from the existing socio-ecological condition. Well, if you start thinking about the environmental problem from that perspective, electrical vehicles don't sound as the solution any longer, do they? The second fantasy is that of course we have to avoid this future scenario, this dystopian future scenario in the name of the people. Humanity. Humanity. In the name of humanity. This of course is predicated upon the presumption that humanity in the sort of western sense exists, of a sort of shared values, interests, etc. That actually exists. Historically, geographical evidence shows that, except for a few pockets here and there, that humanity does not exist. Humans are bloody animals to other humans, right? And that our only hope is, therefore, not to save humanity. That should not be safe, because it's never been there, but to construct a humanity as a future project, not the construction of a humanity, which is about the construction of a people in a political sense is a political process. Now, so I would argue that if one changes the fantasy around which the need for intervention is legitimized from this dystopian future to an already existing catastrophe on the one hand, and on the other hand, that there is no humanity to be safe, but that perhaps might be a humanity that can be constituted. So that will immediately lead to a set of different interventions, policies, technologies, etc. So that would be my advice and suggestion to those who find our kind of arguments interesting. Two last very short questions. So is there something particular that you want to work on 2022 and perhaps some books or articles or videos or films that you would like to recommend to go further in this topic? Oh, that's okay. The first one was the ease. What do I want to work on? I'm working on two things at the moment that I hope to continue. One of them will lead eventually to a book. My biggest concern and interest at the moment is something that I briefly touched upon in our conversation, which is the disjuncture between what we know and how we act. This psychological dissonance is what psychologists call it, fetishistic disavowal is what psychoanalysts call it. We say one thing and we act in a different sort of way. So it's a well known condition, so to speak, but I think it's now become quite dominant, particularly in questions of the environment, climate change, etc. And I try to understand the political meaning, origin and implications of that fetishistic disavowal. And I'm trying to mobilize, because that's the only place I could find the glimpse of an answer to that is the mobilization of teleconian psychoanalysis to the problem of the non-performativity of climate change interventions. Because that is, I think, the greatest problem we face to it. We see the numbers, we see the facts of climate change. They get worse day by day by day. It's easy to demonstrate. On the other hand, there is this great concern, universal concern with the climate manifested in the successive COP meetings. We had COP 26 in Glasgow just a few months ago, last month. So despite the facts and despite the universal concern, nothing is happening. So over the past 20, 30 years, if you look at the climate parameters, they have gone from bad to worse when it's not changing at all. So there is a serious gap, a fetishistic disavowal. And I think a political mobilization of the Canadian psychoanalysis might help us to elucidate that. And through that, to try to reignite, yet again, thinking the environment politically, but not necessarily in the ways we used to do it in the 20th century. The second thing I am writing is about enjoyment, which is also trying to deal with this conundrum, this paradox, that so many people care for the environment and that things are getting worse day by day. So I am trying to mobilize the Canadian concept of enjoyment and how that helps to drive particular types of action and interventions and exclude other actions and interventions. So the working types of the paper is enjoying the climate change. And you can illustrate that to the cultural terrain that I love movies. And I think movies are very useful. There are diverse like disaster movies. How often have we not seen Los Angeles or any other city or the world go under through an ecological environmental catastrophe, viruses, aliens, fire, earthquakes, you name it, and we can't get enough. We can't get enough. And there is always one more, yeah. There is always one more comic. So there is an endless fascination with this kind of disasters and dystopia is also endless fascination with with with with new technologies Elon Musk and is that a Tesla endless fascination with an endless fascination with the climate movements, the, the, and associates, which are fantastic, what they're doing. Nonetheless, despite the endless fascination, the enjoyment, the enjoyment we find in the definitely in these sort of things actually take your attention away from enjoying what we really should enjoy what I would or we should learn to enjoy. That is how to make socially more inclusive Italian and environmentally sensible world. That is what desire ought to be articulated around. And the moment you start thinking about desire in these terms, enjoyment of the catastrophe movie of the enjoyment of the Tesla as a panacea quickly dissipates. We should knock on doors of advertisement companies to learn about this desire and how to. Oh, they know that full well. Exactly. That's why I say that. They know that full well. So you that enjoys movies, any post-apocalyptic movie that you would like to share? There is so many. There is so many. There is so many. Ah, the one, the one that I really like. It's an old one. Totally recall. Totally recall of the first version, not the new one. The first version was a beautiful, perfect class analysis of the political ecological condition on Earth. Although it took place on Mars, it had all to do with with air and water and politics. I would still recommend totally recall the first, the first version of that is one of the great political ecological movies of all times. There's plenty of others. There's another one that I would that I think I would recommend, but I haven't seen it yet. It's now in the cinemas. I wanted to go yesterday, but as you know, I'm sitting in Amsterdam and since yesterday morning five o'clock with almost complete lockdown. So I could not go to that particular movie yesterday. We just don't look up. Okay. It's an all movies now and if you're not in a lockdown, I'm sure you can find it in the cinemas now. The don't look up is a metaphor, I think, for the climate condition that we're in. I think it's very funny and apparently it's very good, but I haven't seen it yet, but I'm looking forward to see it at the first opportunity that arises that is the first moment I'm allowed out of my flat again into a public space. Thanks so much Eric for everything that we discussed so far. It was a pleasure. It was a pleasure for me to thank you very, very much. I hope it was useful, but I certainly enjoyed it. It was for me and I hope for everyone as well. I hope you liked this episode and I'll see you in two weeks for another discussion. Thanks everyone. Thank you.