Nikos Katsikis

In NG06 the editors Daniel Ibañez and Nikos Katsikis aim to trace alternative, synthetic routes to design through a more elaborate understanding of the relation between models and concepts of urban metabolism and the formal, physical, and material engraving of metabolic processes across scales. The concept of urban metabolism has proven to be helpful in unpacking the energy and material inter-dependencies between territories and urban agglomerations and, in the recent years, has been subject to contributions from multiple disciplines, such as ecology, engineering, urban planning and the social sciences. The issue addresses the challenges associated with the planetary dimension of contemporary metabolic processes, offers a critical examination of the long lineage of historical discussions and schemes on urban metabolism from the design disciplines and places them in parallel with a set of contemporary projects and interventions that open up new approaches for design.

The Mississippi River Basin is a vast near-planar surface, an area upon which sunlight falls and wind flows. Its gently banked geomorphology channels precipitation, sediment, biota, and human activity into a dynamic locus of regional Earth system interactions. This paper describes the major features of this region's energy exchanges from a thermodynamic Earth systems perspective. This analysis is combined with descriptions of the historical and socio-political contexts that have helped shape energy use. In doing so, the paper contrasts the region's available energy exchanges and flows with their anthropogenic diversion, providing an account of human impact at a regional scale. It also offers theoretical estimates of the potential availabilities of renewable energy. This is contrasted with a description of the geological formation of stocks of fossil energy in the region. On these bases, a number of maps are presented and an assessment of the region's energy flows is offered. These exercises point to significant affordances for achieving regional de-fossilisation at the river basin scale.

Any attempt to understand and influence urbanization hinges upon representations of the core spatial units that underpin this process and the spatial parameters in which its effects are thought to be circumscribed.  This chapter from the volume Implosions/Explosions reflects upon the ways in which such assumptions have been inscribed and naturalized in major visualizations of the world as a space of urbanization since the early-twentieth century.  Specifically, we consider the ways in which a variety of indicators—population; economic activity; transportation networks; communications infrastructures; and patterns of worldwide land occupation and environmental transformation—have been used in fourteen exemplary maps of cities and the space of the world from the last century.  These materials also illustrate how, even as new, potentially more sophisticated geospatial data sources become available, many of the same basic analytical and representational taxonomies have remained operative in relation to the classic indicators that have long been used to demarcate urbanization processes.  More generally, the chapter argues for an approach to cartographic visualization that is critically attuned to the visual techniques, metageographical assumptions and spatial ideologies that pervade both historical and contemporary representations of the global urban condition. Originally published in in Neil Brenner (ed.), Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization.  Berlin: Jovis, 2013, 460-475.