The production and manufacture of cement plays a key role in the process of metabolic change in cities and generates injustices and environmental suffering on various individuals and communities; who in turn continuously experience and negotiate their power, identity and relationships on multiple scales of social interaction. On this preliminar discussion I argue that dependence on this polluting industry corresponds to a metabolic contradiction that must be examined and theorized in depth, since it can be key to problematize the breaks and reconfigurations that are transforming the urban metabolism of cities. In general, I ask how is the cement industry metabolized in cities? and how is the environmental metabolic contradiction of this industry configured in the different scales of social interaction? In particular, I deem necesary to look at: how the economic,political and cultural context determine the production and contradicting geographical distribution of the industry?; How do discourses and power relations allows for undisputed possession of a productive activity while also hiding the problem of pollution?; How the complex webs of relationships between actors and subjects intertwined in an assembly of environmental suffering configure and reconfigure cities?
I seek to approach these questions by incorporating an expanded framework of Urban Political Ecology that constructs the concepts of metabolic contradiction, from the concepts of urban metabolism (Newell & Cousins, 2015), undisputed possession (Pujadas & Hortas, 2018) and environmental suffering (Auyero & Swistun, 2007) -these last two concepts, mostly used in Latinamerica- to understand how the political-ecological processes linked to the production of cement reveal the inherently contradictory nature of the metabolic change process in cities, which generates a dependency that unravels networks that produce and reproduce injustices and environmental suffering around the cement industry.
Mots clés : Urban political ecology|metabolic contradiction|undisputed possession|Environmental suffering|Cement production
A104079GU