Alfred J. Lotka’s early energetics of evolution provides a rigorous prehistory: organisms persist not simply by possessing energy but by developing devices that channel available energy into pathways favourable to survival, and evolutionary advantage can arise through an increase in the total energy flux through a system. Energy therefore appears from the outset as directional, infrastructural and relational.
Fred Cottrell extends this logic into social organisation by showing that fuels and converters are embedded in matrices of values, institutions and technical arrangements. What a society can do depends upon the energy it can command, yet the social meaning of energetic surplus cannot be reduced to a physical quantity. Surplus is already an evaluation, because energy becomes socially significant through decisions about what counts as expenditure, gain, necessity and desirable transformation. Stefan Bouzarovski shifts the problem from aggregate energetic capacity to uneven infrastructural access. Energy poverty is not simply a shortage of fuel or income; it is assembled through housing conditions, infrastructures, tariffs, institutions, household practices and geographically differentiated regimes of provision. His multi-sited work on European cities converts deprivation into an infrastructural question: vulnerability emerges from the relation between domestic life and larger systems of circulation. Elizabeth Shove radicalises this relational understanding by attacking energy efficiency as an apparently neutral policy category. Efficiency isolates energy from the situations in which it is used, while preserving historically specific expectations of service—comfort, illumination, mobility, convenience—as if these were stable ends. The problem is epistemic before it is technical: once energy is purified into an abstract input-output ratio, the practices that generate demand disappear from view. Madsen and Gram-Hanssen reopen that field by treating comfort as sensory and practice-based. Air, light, softness, temperature, materials and bodily routines participate in what comfort means, so domestic energy demand cannot be explained by thermostatic targets alone. Energy is consumed in the course of accomplishing social practices, and those practices are embodied, habitual and culturally variable. The consequence for urban thought is substantial: demand is not located in appliances or buildings as isolated objects but in relations among bodies, materials, conventions and infrastructures. Derrible, Cheah, Arora and Yeow make the systemic dimension explicit through urban metabolism, an accounting framework for tracing the inflows, outflows and accumulation of materials and energy in cities. Their method translates urban life into measurable exchanges—water, electricity, fuel, food, concrete, asphalt—yet the importance of metabolism exceeds accounting. It establishes the city as an open system whose apparent boundedness depends upon continuous transactions with elsewhere. Anna Zimmer’s urban political ecology turns this metabolic model into a political one. Metabolism becomes a means of asking who controls flows, how urban environments are hybridised, and how power operates through the production of ecological conditions. The city is neither outside nature nor reducible to nature; it is a socio-natural formation whose infrastructures, imaginaries and inequalities are continually co-produced. Gilles Clément’s Third Landscape introduces a crucial counterpoint to the logic of total metabolic management. Abandoned land, reserves and undecided spaces harbour biological diversity precisely because they escape full functional determination. The Third Landscape is not empty but politically and ecologically dense: an ensemble of residual, inaccessible or relinquished territories whose indeterminacy allows forms of life excluded by dominant regimes of exploitation. It shows that not every valuable urban or territorial capacity is generated through intensified circulation; some capacities depend upon suspension, latency and the refusal of programmatic closure. Anna Bloom-Christen translates a similar resistance to abstraction into urban epistemology. To know a city is not to possess an exhaustive representation of it but to acquire participatory and procedural knowledge through immersion, movement and repeated encounter. Walking becomes epistemic because it binds knowledge to situated competence: knowing how to move, recognise, orient, compare, remember and respond. The city is closer to a process than a thing, and knowing it resembles knowing a person insofar as both involve partial, relational and evolving familiarity. Mustafa Emirbayer provides the sociological grammar for this shift from substances to processes. Relational sociology begins when static entities cease to be treated as the primary units of analysis and dynamic unfolding relations become analytically prior. Pierpaolo Donati gives this relationalism a realist inflection by arguing that social relations possess emergent properties irreducible to the individuals or structures they connect. Relations mediate agency and structure, generate morphogenesis and alter the very composition of social formations. Across energy studies, urban political ecology and city epistemology, the same consequence recurs: urban reality is not the sum of objects occupying a territory but the patterned capacity of relations to sustain, transform or interrupt flows. Relational metabolism names this condition. It joins Lotka’s energy flux, Cottrell’s converters, Bouzarovski’s infrastructural vulnerability, Shove’s practices, Derrible’s urban accounts, Zimmer’s socio-natural politics, Clément’s residual ecologies and Bloom-Christen’s situated knowing without collapsing them into one metric. The concept identifies metabolism as simultaneously material and epistemic: cities metabolise energy and matter, but they also metabolise categories, expectations, sensory conventions, legal definitions and forms of knowledge. What circulates changes what can be perceived, demanded and acted upon. Socioplastics becomes especially productive when this relational metabolism is treated as an operative architecture rather than a metaphor. A distributed corpus, like a city, persists through flows that must be captured, converted and maintained: texts move into citations, citations into indexes, images into archives, observations into concepts, operators into retrievable distinctions, and dispersed materials into public knowledge. Lotka’s energy-capturing devices offer a precise analogy for this process because a field increases its capacity not simply by accumulating more matter but by reorganising the pathways through which available matter can become active. Cottrell’s distinction between physical energy and socially evaluated surplus sharpens the analogy further: more documents do not automatically create more intellectual capacity. A corpus produces surplus only when transformations increase what can be retrieved, related, interpreted and reused without consuming more contextual energy than they generate. This makes bibliography, metadata, indexing and persistent identification part of the theoretical apparatus rather than secondary administrative functions. Bouzarovski’s account of energy poverty adds a distributive test. An infrastructure cannot be judged only by aggregate provision; its political form appears in differentiated access. The same is true of epistemic infrastructures. A repository may contain thousands of items while leaving most of them effectively inaccessible through weak metadata, fragmented interfaces or uneven discoverability. Searchability, citation and translation therefore operate as forms of epistemic provision, and their absence can produce something analogous to infrastructural poverty: knowledge exists but cannot be reliably mobilised. Shove’s critique of efficiency is equally consequential. The drive to make archives faster, lighter or more machine-readable can reproduce narrow assumptions about what counts as useful knowledge, just as energy efficiency preserves particular conventions of comfort and service. Compression, automation and optimisation are never neutral if they stabilise the very demands they claim to improve. The relevant measure is not efficiency alone but whether a transformation expands interpretive capacity while preserving the situated differences that make evidence meaningful. Madsen and Gram-Hanssen’s sensorial account of comfort suggests how this can work at the level of spatial research. Light, air, texture, temperature and material presence are not decorative supplements to urban analysis; they are part of the practices through which places are inhabited and known. Their inclusion destabilises the split between quantitative infrastructure and qualitative experience. Derrible’s urban metabolism can then be repurposed as a methodological discipline: trace inflows, outflows and accumulations, but also ask which conversions are measurable, which remain tacit, and which disappear when they cross scales. Zimmer’s political ecology prevents this accounting from becoming technocratic by insisting that metabolism is structured by power. Every flow has a politics of access, visibility and consequence. Clément extends the argument by making non-circulation itself productive. Archives and cities both require zones that resist immediate exploitation: unclassified materials, marginal documents, dormant links, neglected places and unresolved fragments may preserve diversity precisely because they have not yet been forced into a dominant schema. The Third Landscape thus becomes an epistemic principle of reserve. Not every trace must immediately acquire a function; some must remain available for future relations that cannot yet be predicted. Bloom-Christen’s procedural knowledge gives the corresponding rule for use. Knowledge of an urban field is enacted through movement and repeated encounter, not exhausted by representation. Socioplastics can therefore treat navigation itself as research: following references, crossing media, comparing sites, returning to forgotten nodes and allowing the corpus to disclose structures that no single overview could contain. Emirbayer and Donati supply the ontological guarantee for such a practice. Relations are not annotations added after objects have been defined; they are among the conditions through which objects acquire identity, durability and transformative power. A node becomes significant through the networks it enters, the distinctions it activates and the recurrences it produces. Relational metabolism consequently provides a stronger model of field construction than accumulation. It describes a system in which energetic, informational, ecological and interpretive capacities are continuously redistributed across infrastructures, bodies and archives. Its political question is who or what receives capacity; its epistemic question is what becomes knowable through each conversion; its ecological question is what must remain undetermined in order for new forms to emerge. Socioplastics is strengthened when it treats its own archive as such a metabolic field: neither closed database nor unlimited flow, but a patterned ecology of conversions, reserves, exposures and unequal intensities. Within Socioplastics, this condition condenses as InsightViscosity.
Anto Lloveras is an architect and urban researcher working across spatial practice, epistemology, media archives, infrastructure and relational urban systems through LAPIEZA LAB and Socioplastics.
Bibliography
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Bouzarovski, S. (2018) Energy Poverty: (Dis)Assembling Europe’s Infrastructural Divide. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69299-9.
Clément, G. (2004) Manifeste du Tiers Paysage. Paris: Éditions Sujet/Objet.
Cottrell, F. (1955) Energy and Society. New York: McGraw-Hill. Spanish selection reproduced in ‘Fred Cottrell. Energía y sociedad (selección)’ (2023), Arbor, 199(807).
Derrible, S., Cheah, L., Arora, M. and Yeow, L.W. (2021) ‘Urban Metabolism’, in Shi, W., Goodchild, M.F., Batty, M., Kwan, M.-P. and Zhang, A. (eds.) Urban Informatics. Singapore: Springer, pp. 85–114. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8983-6_7.
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