This project centers on a joint book by Neil Brenner and Swarnabh Ghosh, Into the Shatter Zone: Planetary Urbanization, Fossil Energy, and Biospheric Crisis, which offers a geohistorical reinterpretation of capitalist urbanization in the context of escalating climate and ecological breakdown. The book argues that non-city territories and environments—in general terms, the “hinterlands” of the city—are the sociometabolic foundation of capitalist urbanization. This proposition has major implications for the question of how cities and urbanization are articulated to proliferating climate and nature emergencies. It requires us to rethink, on a fundamental level, such basic questions as how cities contribute to carbon emissions or biodiversity loss, or more generally, global warming or overpollution. The project demonstrates how a reconceptualization of the capitalist form of urbanization drastically reshapes our understanding of major arenas of empirical research, policy practice, and public debate in a field of intensive concern—and investment—across the Earth.

The work develops this proposition through (a) a systematic critique of city-centric streams of urban theory and research, which reduce the urban problematique to the growth of cities; (b) a systematic critique of inherited approaches to urban metabolism due to their relatively unhistorical embrace of various dualisms (city/hinterland, urban/rural, town/country) that limit their grasp of the geohistorical relations, processes, transformations, and crises that constitute this process; and (c) the elaboration of a new conceptualization of such issues based upon a systematic spatialization of work by Jason W. Moore on capitalist world-ecology, which emphasizes the specificity of capital’s metabolism of plunder, productivity, and pollution. On this basis, the book reconstructs the geohistory of capitalist urbanization since the 1870s, when fossil energy became broadly integrated into capitalist production and circulation under conditions of planetary imperial expansion, infrastructural extension, and large-scale landscape transformation. It proposes the concept of the Long Intensification to describe this period: a historically specific, Earth-transforming matrix of city/non-city relations marked by rising volumes, accelerating velocities, and expanding distances of matter/energy throughput, coupled with escalating streams of pollution and toxic discharge into the biosphere. This process is theorized as a planetary cascade of geo-metabolic escalation—not simply urban growth, but the continual terraforming of landscapes, infrastructures, and environments through relentlessly profit-driven waves of extraction, appropriation, capitalization, and wasting.

A central contribution of the project is its analysis of the dialectical relation between throughput ecologies (metabolic intensification) and exhaustion ecologies (socioenvironmental degradation, depletion, dispossession, and displacement). In this view, contemporary crises—climate disruption, biodiversity loss, pollution, zoonotic disease, and mass displacement—are not accidental byproducts of urban expansion but are internal to the fossil-based metabolic regime of capital and its urban-imperial geopolitical ecologies. Overall, the project seeks to reframe urban environmental thought by placing planetary socio-metabolic relations, the making of operational landscapes, the proliferation of sacrifice zones, and ecologies of repair and regeneration at the center of analysis.

A future phase of this work will involve intensive collaboration with UTL researchers to develop spatial data visualizations of the various throughput ecologies and exhaustion ecologies of urbanization that underpinned the Long Intensification. This work will form the basis of future scholarly publications, including journal articles, a book, and a public exhibition. It will offer a basis on which to communicate to a broader public the core insights of this project related to the role of (capitalist) urbanization in the escalating climate and nature emergencies of our time.