ABSTRACT
While strategies to tackle obesity have led to renewed debate about the specific relationship between the body and urban form (Sui 2003) the (im)mobilities of fat through bodies, cities and infrastructure reveal a more complex web of urban metabolisms. We argue that to understand the mobilities of fat in a city context metaphors of urban metabolism become important. Urban metabolism need not refer to stable sets of relationships in which explanations of social order subsequently refer, consider for example the early work of the Chicago school (Park et al. 1967). 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”, Harvey (2003: 34) argues, “are constituted out of the flows of energy, water, food, commodities, money, people and all the other necessities that sustain life”. Metaphors of metabolism are therefore useful for understanding such flows. The contingencies and mobilities of fat in bodies (as individuals), cities (as a collective site of action) and sewers (as infrastructure), we argue, highlights a multiplicity of urban metabolisms, each with different interconnectivities and forms of instability.
