Toward an agentic understanding of the urban metabolism: a landscape theory perspective

ABSTARCT An understanding of human and non-human agency is essential to fully capture the nature and configurations of resource circulations and "metabolic" dynamics in cities. Since their inception, urban political ecology and more-than-human ontologies have raised fundamental questions about these entangled agencies, which resonated widely in urban studies and, to some degree, in urban metabolism research. This essay argues that landscape theory provides a rich, yet less explored, reservoir of concepts and methods to investigate the role of agentic capacities in metabolic dynamics and the society-nature relations they reflect. Two landscape approaches describing the landscape as a locus of distributed agency are discussed to illustrate novel modes of agentic inquiry in metabolic studies. Finally, using water ecologies as examples, I ask to what extent a sociology of distribution of resources and agencies can become a new "matter of concern" for urban metabolism research and foster dialectical conceptions of the metabolic paradigm.