Scholars from the Urban Theory Lab at the University of Chicago and the Habitat Unit at TU Berlin – in dialogue with leading voices in critical urban geography and political ecology – reflect on the socio-ecological entanglements linking cities to distant geographies of extraction, production, circulation and waste.

What role do spaces beyond the city play in urbanisation? How is the metabolism of cities being transformed in an era of climate breakdown and how is it bound to the extended spatialities of social and ecological inequality?

Cities have always depended on more-than-city landscapes for resources and waste absorption. Under conditions of planetary urbanisation, however, the scale and intensity of these dependencies have increased. The hinterlands that sustain urban life are no longer the agricultural fields, forests and quarries immediately surrounding the city. Instead, they encompass vast, interconnected geographies stretched across the planet: agro-industrial zones, mining regions, energy corridors, logistical networks, infrastructural systems and waste landscapes.

These operational landscapes form the metabolic bases of contemporary urbanisation. They sustain urban life while bearing the disproportionate burdens of extraction, dispossession, ecological degradation, pollution and uneven spatial development. Yet they remain largely invisible in mainstream urban discourse, which continues to equate the urban with dense populations and vertical infrastructure.

Against this backdrop, this public talk reflects on the hinterland question under planetary urbanisation. As capitalist supply chains, energy systems and waste flows weave cities into multiscalar networks of more-than-city geographies, the conceptual and representational tools through which we understand the urban must be fundamentally rethought. Making these planetary entanglements visible – and therefore contestable – is among the most urgent challenges for urban theory, research, design and policy in the face of the accelerating socio-ecological crises of our time.

Programme