ABSTRACT
While strategies to tackle obesity have led to renewed debate about the specifi c relationship between the body and urban forms, the deposition of fat through bodies, cities, and infrastructure reveals a more complex web of urban metabolisms.356 We argue that in order to understand the circulation of fat in a city context, metaphors of urban metabolism become important. Urban metabolism need not refer to stable sets of relationships to which explanations of social order subsequently refer: consider, for example, the early Chicago School work.357 However, to reject the concept of metabolism by reducing it to functionalist and teleological metaphors would be to lose the insights a reformulated concept can reveal. “Cities,” David Harvey argues, “are constituted out of the fl ows of energy, water, food, commodities, money, people and all the other necessities that sustain life.”358 Metaphors of metabolism are therefore useful for understanding such fl ows. The contingencies and mobilities of fat in bodies (as individuals), cities (as a collective site of action), and sewers (as infrastructure), we argue, highlight a multiplicity of urban metabolisms, each with different interconnectivities and forms of instability.
