This article proposes an agentic understanding of urban metabolism informed by landscape theory. It argues that urban resource systems are not passive configurations but are continually produced by interacting human and non-human actors.

Drawing on urban political ecology, more-than-human ontology and landscape scholarship, the article develops the idea of distributed agency. It uses water ecologies and resource landscapes to show how materials, infrastructures, institutions and living processes participate in shaping urban change.

The paper is foundational to the Lab’s later aIST-nexus and multispecies work. It reframes the distribution of resources and the distribution of agency as connected matters of concern, opening metabolism research to conflict, responsibility and design.