Circulations and Metabolisms: (Hybrid) Natures and (Cyborg) Cities

摘要

Imagine standing on Piccadilly Circus in London and considering the socio-environmental metabolic relations that come together in this global-local place. Smells, tastes, things, and bodies from all nooks and crannies of the world are floating by, consumed, displayed, narrated, visualized and transformed. The Amazon Forest Shop and Restaurant plays to the tune of eco-sensitive shopping and the multi-billion pound eco-industry while competing with McDonalds' burgers and Dunkin' Donuts. The sounds of world music vibrate from Virgin's Megastore, while people, spices, clothes, foodstuffs and materials from all over the planet whirl by. The neon lights are fed by nuclear processes, coal or gas burning in far-off power plants, while passing cars consume fuels from oil-deposits and pump CO_2 into the air, affecting forests, climates and people around the globe. These disparate processes trace the global geographic mappings that flow through the urban and 'produce' cities as palimpsests of densely layered bodily, local, national and global— but geographically depressingly uneven—socio-ecological and technonatural processes. This intermingling of things material and things symbolic produces a particular socio-environmental milieu that welds nature, society and the city together, often through many layers of networked technostructures (like pipes, cables, relay stations, logistical apparatuses and the like), in a deeply heterogeneous, conflicting and often disturbing whole (Swyngedouw, 1996).