Coding urban metabolism: infrastructuring metabolic pathways

This chapter proposes a metabolic reading of infrastructures that allows us to consider their role in the extraction, circulation and transformation of materials used by our contemporary societies. Between what the author identifies here as homeostatic and political ecology approaches, the chapter proposes a third way by the use of the notion of ‘metabolic pathways’ which allows us to understand the socio-political stakes associated with specific materials. This approach requires considering infrastructures in a broader sense, integrating all the socio-technical means but also practices and networks of actors that comprise so many forms of infrastructuring of metabolic pathways. The analysis of these strategies through the example of plastic waste in Cairo, using a Deleuzian reading, allows us to decipher the registers of legitimisation and the power relations that exist between different strategies of infrastructuring of metabolic pathways that participate in the constitution of a given socio-material order.