Léna Chalmeau is a visiting researcher from the Catholic University of Lille whose collaboration with the Urban Metabolism Lab focuses on agency and environmental politics. Her research contributes to the Lab’s effort to move beyond descriptions of urban systems as purely technical arrangements of flows and stocks.

By examining institutions, collective actors, political negotiation and environmental decision-making, she explores how metabolic processes are governed and contested. This perspective helps connect the Lab’s conceptual work on agency with questions of power, responsibility and public action. Her visiting research supports a more politically explicit understanding of urban metabolism in which resource distributions are shaped not only by infrastructure and technology but also by competing interests, regulatory frameworks and the capacity of different groups to influence change.