Time: 24 September 2025, 6 p.m.
Location: Main building, Geschwister-Scholl-Straße 8, Oberlichtsaal

Nikos Katsikis
Assistant Professor of Urbanism
Delft University of Technology
http://www.terraurbis.com/

This presentation examines how planetary urbanization under capitalism is dependent upon—and produces—vast operational landscapes of extraction, circulation, and waste, which sustain urban life while driving ecological degradation and uneven spatial development. These landscapes, which include agricultural zones, mines, forests, and logistical infrastructures, operationalize the vast majority of the planetary terrain and are central to the socio-material metabolism of the Capitalocene. They function as global hinterlands where both human and more-than-human work is exploited to generate ecological surplus: unpaid labor appropriated in the search for profit. As operational landscapes are organized to maximize this surplus, their productivity depends on the ongoing appropriation, and leads to the eventual exhaustion, of ecological systems. The process of urbanization, in this light, is not simply the transformation of human settlements, but an extensive animated geography of extraction, circulation, and depletion. As agglomerations zones concentrate population and capital, they externalize their metabolic demands onto increasingly distant and specialized landscapes, rendering them interchangeable and disposable within global value chains. This spatial logic produces uneven patterns of development, ecological harm, and territorial precarity. Centering the relationship between urbanization, operational landscapes, and ecological surplus offers a critical lens on the political ecology of the urban. The presentation concludes by engaging with the paradigms of ecoregionalism, circularity, and degrowth as potential frameworks for designing post-extractive, regenerative, and spatially just urban metabolisms.

Information about the annual conference:
www.uni-weimar.de/ifeu/transformation

Facilitator: Hendrik Sander (IfEU)
Email: hendrik.sander[at]uni-weimar.de