The Monster ‘Within’: Capitalist Urbanization as Geometabolic Escalation

Neil Brenner and Swarnabh Ghosh

Development and Change, 2025, vol. 56, issue 4-5, 668-728

Abstract: This article challenges prevailing approaches to urban sustainability by reconceptualizing capitalist urbanization as a planetary process of geometabolic escalation. Hegemonic visions of sustainable cities render invisible the non‐city sociometabolic preconditions and consequences of urban life under capitalism. Our dissident theorization brings to the foreground such ‘hidden abodes’ of capitalist urbanization and their role in the enclosure, operationalization and degradation of the planetary biosphere. The fossil‐based metabolic regime of capital, consolidated in the 1870s and planetarized during what this article terms the ‘Long Intensification’, has transformed cities into strategic nodes within a fossil‐powered formation of the capitalist urban fabric. This unevenly extended infrastructural matrix escalates the throughput of matter/energy while discharging toxic waste into the biosphere and generating planetary waves of social dispossession. The analysis reveals the dialectical relationship between throughput ecologies (of metabolic intensification) and exhaustion ecologies (of socioenvironmental destruction) that underpins this process. As carbon‐intensive patterns of fixed capital are locked in and extended, cities become ‘blazing bonfires’ that metabolize colossal quantities of energy while projecting their destructive socioenvironmental impacts onto operational landscapes of appropriation and sacrifice zones of ruination. Meanwhile, rather than facilitating transitions away from fossil fuels, renewable energy has primarily supplemented expanding relays of fossil energy production and consumption, further ratcheting up capital's spatial metabolism of plunder, productivity and pollution. Urban sustainability programmes frequently serve to legitimize new forms of eco‐apartheid, creating protected enclaves for privileged populations while preserving imperial circuits of extraction and waste. Drawing inspiration from Mike Davis, the article navigates between analytic despair and utopian possibility to envision alter‐metabolisms that might interrupt capital's destructive planetary trajectory without succumbing to the false hopes associated with ‘renewables capitalism’. This article proposes a radically relational, anti‐capitalist reconfiguration of sustainability politics, grounded in degrowth strategies, anti‐imperialist sociometabolic relations, democratic control of infrastructures and programmes of ecological repair.

Date: 2025
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