Metabolic inequalities in Mumbai

Colin McFarlane

City, 2013, vol. 17, issue 4, 498-503

Abstract: In this piece, I argue that a focus on metabolic inequalities offers an important route away from the traps of 'telescopic urbanism' outlined by Ash Amin. Drawing on research in Mumbai, especially on sanitation and water, I position a 'metabolic lens' in contrast to a 'telescopic lens'. I argue that a focus on the networks of metabolic inequality by necessity takes us away from any separating out of a 'business' and 'human potential' city (and the attendant risks Amin warns of), and takes us instead through neighbourhoods and villages, municipal offices and corporate practices, pipes and irrigation, the political use of rainfall, and so on. Such a critical grounding demands a rejection of the elite coding of modernity's metabolisms and the production of an alternative metabolic politics at each stage of the network.

Date: 2013
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DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2013.812354

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