Resource Ecologies, Urban Metabolisms, and the Provision of Essential Services

This short commentary starts from the observation that, until recently, most research addressing infrastructures within urban studies has largely downplayed crucial environmental resource issues. While urban and broader inequalities in and through the distribution of resource flows have been examined, especially within an urban political ecology perspective, other issues, fundamentally associated with resource qualitative and quantitative limitations, largely have not. We therefore argue in this paper that resource issues, broadly construed, can and indeed should be explicitly addressed within an extended conceptualization of (urban) metabolisms. This leads us to re-envisage the frameworks through which urban infrastructures and the provision of essential services should be analyzed. We thus advocate for an update of the urban political ecology agenda that brings resource issues, in their material, political, and spatial dimensions to the center of scientific attention.