Nathan Marom

Metropolitan Regions (MRs) are a critical scale for addressing urbanization and understanding complex socio-ecological systems in relation to the climate crisis. They put enormous material demands and environmental pressures on natural environments, mediated through complex infrastructural-technical systems. Yet despite their impact, the material-environmental processes operating at the MR scale are rarely addressed holistically. The project will address this challenge by developing an interdisciplinary concept of Metro-Political Metabolisms (MPM) that captures both the expanded metropolitan scale of metabolism and its critical political dimensions. The goals of the project are three-fold:

• Theoretically, to develop a new conceptual framework of MPM that significantly expands current understandings of Urban Metabolism. This expansion is at once spatial (address multiple scales), temporal (combine material “stock-taking” with an understanding of metabolism as a socio-historical process), and thematic (connect to “nexus” approaches and account for politics, power relations, and injustice).
• Empirically, to apply the MPM framework to systematically compare the Tel Aviv Metropolitan Region with the Métropole du Grand Paris, building on my ongoing work on the political ecologies of the Tel Aviv MR.
• To outline new policy ideas and tools that focus on the interactions between different metabolic fields and build on the project’s interdisciplinary insights.