Metabolic Systems

How can design reclaim the forms, technologies, economies and logistics of waste streams in the production of urbanism? The collaborative architectural practice Design Earth, led by El Hadi Jazairy and Rania Ghosn, visualizes the geographies of waste systems and charts their material, political, and scalar attributes. This contribution proposes five architectural strategies that engage alternative imaginaries for landfilling, recycling, burning, re-using, dumping and valuing matter.

As physicist and Earth System scientist Axel Kleidon argues, the future evolution of humans and their technosphere is not a random, unpredictable outcome. Rather, the technosphere might represent the thermodynamic imperative of advancing the Earth system to higher levels of activity with greater energy conversion. Could it be said that with the development of the technosphere, the Earth is currently undergoing a shift to a state of greater activity?

The relation between geological history and hypermodernity amounts to the smallest of catalytic processes. Historian of industrial chemistry Benjamin Steiniger describes the technological metabolism that is forging an intimate connection between fossil materiality and humankind.

Urbanization organizes the planetary terrain—not just through cities and agglomeration zones, but also through the totality of diffused production areas and global commodity chains. On the basis of a metageographical analysis, urbanist Nikos Katsikis portrays the extensive transformation of the planetary terrain through the assembly of operational landscapes into a functional “Hinterglobe.”

Food is the tissue of civilization, weaving cities and countries together. In her essay, architect and food thinker Carolyn Steel provides a powerful prompt for us to reconsider the geographic and societal interdependency of urban centers and food-providing ecosystems and to find a way to move beyond the perils of the modern industrial food complex.

What can we learn about care and processing emotions from soil cultivation? Activist and geography scholar Huiying Ng reflects on the unintentional effects of metabolic rifts in the geological and chemical realms, as they become enmeshed within the emotional fissures underlying our current social and cultural spheres. Ng identifies such shifts in the metabolism of emotional culture as potential paths for developing alternative forms for living with others.

Using the slime mold Physarum polycephalum as a many-headed case in point, artist Jenna Sutela delves into the petri dish that is cognition. The microbial stew that has emerged to instrumentalize humans and their technology is unfolded through sound and text to explore an embodied cognitive process well beyond the reach of any single species.

In his original writings on the technosphere from the early 2010s, Peter Haff identified its existence as a grand metabolizing system. Back in early 2016, spurred on by the preparation for HKW’s Anthropocene Campus: The Technosphere Issue, a vehement debate sprang up in the home of science and technology scholars Gabrielle Hecht and Paul N. Edwards: How valid is Haff’s approach? What is its overall reality? And what is its heuristic purpose? In this republication of their dispute, you, the reader, can engage alongside Hecht and Edwards in the ongoing question of whether the concept of the technosphere is indeed “a useful tool,” “silverware,” or “a barren gadget” in understanding the current and future condition of planet Earth.

By going through the transitions in cell evolution and energy regimes, evolutionary biologist Manfred Laubichler explains the dynamics behind the formation of the metabolic activity and complexity of our planet. Our current sociotechnological system seems to be producing just another step change in evolutionary history, leaving us with the question of what is needed to halt its negative effects, which threaten to annihilate life on Earth as we know it.

Cultural scholar Esther Leslie reveals the vexing temporalities of contemporary types of waste as it unsettles the socioeconomic logic of extraction and decay. Plastic fabrics and electronics molecularly molded from fossil hydrocarbons and rare earths, together with the multiple toxic byproducts of their life cycle, suggest a new history of the synthetic and the natural.