Circulations and metabolisms: (Hybrid) Natures and (Cyborg) cities

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 CO2 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 socioenvironmental 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). In the summer of 1998, the Southeast Asian financial bubble imploded. Global capital moved spasmodically from place to place, leaving cities like Jakarta with a social and physical wasteland where dozens of unfinished skyscrapers are dotted over the landscape while thousands of unemployed children, women, and men roam the streets in search of survival. In the mean time, El Nino’s global dynamics were wreaking havoc in the region with its climatic disturbances. Puddles of stagnant water in the defunct skyscrapers that had once promised continuing capital accumulation for Indonesia became breeding grounds and ecological niches for mosquitoes. Malaria and Dengue fever suddenly Science as Culture Vol. 15, No. 2, 105–121, June 2006