ABSTRACT
In the introductory chapter we argued that cities are constituted through dense networks of interwoven socio-ecological processes that are simultaneously human, physical, discursive, cultural, material, and organic. Circulatory conduits of water, foodstuffs, cars, fumes, money, labour, etc., move in and out of the city, transform the city, and produce the urban as a continuously changing socio-ecological landscape. Imagine, for example, standing on the corner of Piccadilly Circus in London, and consider the socio-environmental metabolic relations that come together in this global-local place: smells, tastes, and bodies from all nooks and crannies of the world are floating by, consumed, displayed, narrated, visualized and transformed. The “Rainforest” shop and restaurant play to the tune of ecosensitive shopping and the multi-billion pound eco-industry while competing with McDonalds’ burgers and Dunkin’ Donuts, whose products – like burgers, coffee, orange juice, or cream cheese – are equally the result of processes that fuse together and interconnect social and biochemical relations from many places, near and far away. Consider how human bodies – of migrants, prostitutes, workers, capitalists – spices, clothes, foodstuffs, and materials from all over the world whirl by. The neon lights are fed by energy coming from nuclear power plants and from coal-, oil-, or gas-burning electricity generators. Cars, taxis, and buses move on fuels from oil-deposits (now again from Iraq) and pump CO2 into the air, affecting peoples, forests and climates in places around the globe. All these flows complete the global geographic mappings and traces that flow through the urban and “produce” London (or any other city) as a palimpsest of densely layered bodily, local, national and global – but depressingly geographically uneven – metabolic socio-ecological processes. This intermingling of material and symbolic things produces the vortexes of modern life, combines to produce a particular socio-environmental milieu that welds nature, society, and the city together in a deeply heterogeneous, conflicting and often disturbing whole (Swyngedouw 1996).
