Cities in Deep Time

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Apollo City analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action ISSN: 1360-4813 (Print) 1470-3629 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccit20 Cities in deep time Matthew Gandy To cite this article: Matthew Gandy (2018) Cities in deep time, City, 22:1, 96-105, DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2018.1434289 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2018.1434289 © 2018 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published online: 15 Mar 2018. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 596 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ccit20 CITY, 2018 VOL. 22, NO. 1, 96–105, https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2018.1434289 Cities in deep time Bio-diversity, metabolic rift, and the urban question Matthew Gandy How should we interpret the relationship between urbanization and the loss of bio-diversity? The discourse of bio-diversity serves as a critical lens through which the accelerating momentum of ‘metabolic rift’ can be explored in relation to contemporary mass extinction. But what is the precise role of cities within what has been referred to as the ‘sixth extinction’ facing the history of the earth? Are cities to be subsumed within a broader environmentalist critique of modernity or can they serve as the focal point for alternative cultural, political, and scientific interventions? This article suggests that the distinction between cities and broader processes of urbanization remains significant for a more critically engaged reading of the politics of the biosphere. Indeed, an overemphasis on ‘methodological global- ism’ risks obscuring the differences that matter in the articulation of alternative modernities. In particular, we consider how the relationship between cities and ‘deep time’ can be con- ceptualized as a focal point for the interpretation of global environmental change. Key words: bio-diversity, urban ecology, metabolic rift, the Anthropocene, deep time 1. Cities in the anthropocene middle decades of the twentieth century, has focused attention on a radical and poten- merging interest in the identification tially irreversible discontinuity in the socio- of a new geological epoch encom- ecological relations that have underpinned Epasses an array of critical perspectives, global modernity. putative chronologies, and alternative ter- A focus on the Anthropocene transcends minologies. The recent coalescence around the restricted political and temporal terrain the term Anthropocene, a neologism that of the ‘sustainable development’ agenda that first passed almost unnoticed in the 1980s, emerged in the 1980s by emphasizing patt- signals a profound sense that a fundamentally erns of environmental change over a much different epoch is now superseding the Holo- longer time period. The case for a new geo- cene that began some 11,700 years ago. logical periodization draws on two inter- Although the Holocene encompassed the related sets of arguments: first, the origins of agriculture and the rise of the first accelerating momentum in human induced cities, a series of more recent developments, sources of environmental change; and including the emergence of capitalism second, a neo-catastrophist interpretation of during the ‘long sixteenth century’, and the the earth’s history that emphasizes not just dramatic spike in resource use since the the scale of previous geo-environmental # 2018 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. GANDY: CITIES IN DEEP TIME 97 transitions but also their rapidity. The inter- utilization, and the gradual emergence of related threats to the biosphere from bio- the ‘technosphere’ comprising ‘the sum total diversity loss, climate change, and accumulat- of all the earth’s physical infrastructure’ (see ing environmental ‘sinks’ connect with ‘deep Otter 2017, 146). Under this conceptual- time’ as a frame of reference that moves ization, which bears similarities with the ‘pla- beyond the conventional scope of historical netary urbanization’ thesis, cities are simply a analysis to engage with forms of radical historically and geographically specific mani- discontinuity. festation of a broader set of processes and A key contention of the Anthropocene is interdependencies (see Brenner 2014). that we are now entering a sixth mass extinc- Several different starting points have been tion event in which human survival is ren- suggested for the Anthropocene including dered uncertain (see, for example, Ceballos, the megafauna extinctions, the emergence Ehrlich, and Dirzo 2017; Kolbert 2014; of agriculture, the discovery of the New Lovejoy 2012). Under previous mass extinc- World, the proto capitalist realm of seven- tions, of which five have now been recog- teenth-century Holland, the switch from nized, over 90 per cent of all life forms were water to steam power in late eighteenth wiped out. During the third mass extinction century England, the ‘mercurial signature’ of the mid-Permian period, for instance, within the global food chain, radioactive some 260 million years ago, warming temp- traces left by the detonation of the first eratures released vast quantities of hydrogen nuclear weapons, and more recently, the sulphide from dead bacteria, turning the extraction of rare earths under the transition oceans purple, and releasing poisonous to digital capitalism. Cities hold a growing bubbles of gas into ‘a pale green sky’ presence within this panoply of historical (Zimmer cited in Kolbert 2014, 104). These developments as centres for trade, consump- imaginary accounts of past environmental tion, and the coordination of wider pro- dystopias located in deep time serve to cesses of state formation. Indeed, the emphasize the ephemeral and fragile nature growth of cities has even been referred to of the ecological relations that have under- as a potential ‘golden spike’ within the pinned the possibilities for life let alone the future stratigraphic record marked by a dis- intricate forms of socio-ecological interde- tinctive me´lange of burrowings and material pendence that have allowed human capacities traces (see Davies 2015). to flourish under modernity. The more incisive literature on the Anthro- Our understanding of environmental tran- pocene has sought to link causality with sitions in the modern era needs to be tem- periodicity. The first use of steam power in pered by evidence of past waves of human 1784, for example, serves as a convenient modification of the biosphere. Even the ear- marker within a broad history of increasing liest hunter-gatherer cultures emerging in human impact on the biosphere. The switch the Pleistocene epoch, over two hundred from water to steam power increased the thousand years ago, had an extensive environ- mobility of capital and enabled the transfer mental impact through the use of fire to of production from predominantly rural modify natural environments, along with areas to fast growing industrial towns such the hunting of megafauna in which perhaps as Birmingham and Manchester (see Kunkel two-thirds of large mammal species were 2017; Malm 2016). Furthermore, the creation lost (see, for example, Broswimmer 2014). of large pools of (surplus) labor tilted the Subsequent episodes of environmental trans- balance of power in favor of capital and formation during the Holocene have involved freed production from the constraints of a steady expansion of the ‘human niche’ into nature, location, and potential labor existing ecosystems, marked by the rise of shortages. The concomitant reliance on agriculture, new patterns of resource fossil fuels also dramatically expanded the 98 CITY VOL. 22, NO.1 potential scope, scale, and mobility of indust- political context (for a classic exposition of rial production adding further impetus to this argument see Tafuri 1987). In this sense capitalist urbanization. the urban becomes a space of multiple possi- It would be misleading, however, to argue bilities driven not just by the logic of capital that capitalism and urbanization are fully but emerging from a series of socio- synonymous even though the built environ- ecological, technological, and ideological ment, and the secondary circuit of capital, entanglements. What forms of agency, has played a key role within the expansionary materiality, or imagination can co-exist or dynamics of global capital. As Ernest Mandel even flourish in spite of the functionalist has pointed out, following Lefebvre, the pro- imperative of capitalist urbanization? What blematic dimensions to urbanization are an kinds of alternative socio-ecological or tech- outcome of the structural and political nological pathways might serve as intima- characteristics of capital rather than inherent tions of a different future? features of the modern city: From a somewhat different perspective these ambivalent dimensions to urbanization ‘The blatant deformation of urban have also been considered within the bur- development since the industrial

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