Multispecies and Post-Growth Urban Metabolism is an emerging research strand connecting urban political ecology, degrowth and more-than-human approaches to resource systems. It asks how cities might reduce material and energy throughput while recognising that urban economies are sustained by the work, habitats and vulnerabilities of non-human beings.

The strand develops concepts including multispecies labour alliances, ecological unequal exchange and metabolic imperialism. Conference papers and conceptual publications examine how metropolitan nature is produced through transfers of value and environmental burden within and between species, and how nature-based transformations may reproduce inequalities when land, labour and ecosystem functions are treated as freely available inputs.

This research extends Daniela Perrotti’s agentic approach by foregrounding distributed and contested agency. It also provides a critical counterpoint to technocratic circularity: post-growth transitions are evaluated not only through efficiency but through questions of sufficiency, justice, care and the political conditions under which humans and non-humans can inhabit cities together.