Agency and Environmental Politics in Urban Metabolism examines how power, responsibility and the capacity to act are distributed across urban resource systems. The visiting-research project connects metabolism analysis with political ecology in order to understand why certain flows, infrastructures and environmental burdens become visible while others remain marginalised.

The research considers public institutions, firms, communities, technologies, ecosystems and material processes as heterogeneous participants in urban change. It investigates how decisions are negotiated across scales and how the representation of a system influences which actors are recognised in policy and modelling. This perspective is particularly relevant where resource transitions generate uneven benefits, exclusions or new dependencies.

Developed through collaboration between the Université Catholique de Lille and the University of Louvain, the project reinforces the Lab’s critical and agentic research programme. It helps connect the formal analysis of resource systems to questions of legitimacy, conflict and environmental justice. No dedicated external project grant is publicly specified.