ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to give a general overview of city-nature relationships and long-term urban socio-ecological trajectories on the basis of two main concepts: urban metabolism and urban hinterland. Applied to human societies, metabolism refers to the material and energy flows necessary to sustain human life and human activities as a whole. It is the material expression of the socio-ecological regime that characterizes a particular society during a particular period. From a socio-ecological point of view, it is possible to argue that one of the main characteristics of cities lies in the externalization of their metabolism. As a consequence, cities depend on certain areas of supply and emission that are mostly located outside of their own limits, and the environmental imprints of cities can be found in different parts of the world. Thus, infrastructures play a major role in urban metabolism. Supply and emission areas are functionally related to cities and represent the hinterland of these cities. Both urban metabolism and urban hinterland differ from one city to another and were subject to change and transitions during the last centuries. This raises the question of the drivers and actors of urban socio-ecological regimes. Tracing the question of who decided on the way urban metabolism was organized and how urban hinterlands in this respect were framed—and changed—over time means detecting material forces (the geo- and hydromorphology of a site, climate, precipitation regimes) as well as rather abstract categories of human agency (capital, economy, politics, culture) and specific human actors (monarchs, landlords, city magistrates, tradesmen, engineers). As we will argue, difficulties in doing so increase with the complexity of the globalizing hinterlands.
