Rotten Capital: Rethinking Urban Metabolism with Mold

Keywords: spores, urban political ecology, urban metabolism, spatial fix, more-than-human geographies, animal geographies
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 10

Abstract

This paper brings more-than-human and animal geographies into closer dialogue with urban metabolism in urban political ecology (UPE) by using mold and its spores as vital boundary objects (Star & Griesemer, 1989). Even though UPE has always been “more-than-human” in a way regarding the dialectical urbanization of nature, no empirical or conceptual alignment with what is labelled as more-than-human geographies has been made so far. Yet, both research strands offer several points of contact especially when focusing on the realm of the urban i.e. the city as common space of assemblage and friction. Therefore, mold’s biochemical metabolism of decomposition and its transformative capacity of changing states between airborne spores and spatialized colonies will be related to some of the most significant objects of research in urban metabolism like water, built structures, commodities, waste, and capital. This is organized around three analytical key categories of critical entanglement that seek to make way for more-than-human urban metabolisms: mold as hydrological cyborg fungus refers to the socio-technically enhanced mobilities of mold/spores and the allocation of water in the urban environment; mold’s spatial fix refers to David Harvey’s prominent notion in both its literal meanings and the question of capital (dis)investments and speculation; whereas mold’s biosemiotic switch refers to the devaluation of commodities like edibles. In conclusion, these different moldy trajectories will be settled in discussing mold as a potent driver for ever new possibilities of creative destruction in capitalism that can become profitably utilized in different directions in the form of rotten capital.