Re-Politicizing Urban Metabolism through Mapping: A Methodological Exploration through the Lens of Urban Political Ecology

The notion of territorial instability—a state of unrest that could lead to forced displacement—is aggravated in multi-risk contexts, where pending threats accentuate vulnerabilities and affect territorial metabolisms. The interaction between Multi-Risk Assessment, Urban Metabolism and Urban Political Ecology frameworks lays the groundwork for the construction of a transdisciplinary methodology for co-mapping UM lifecycles. Thanks to the Quintuple Helix approach in Urban Living Labs, the political dimension of Urban Metabolism is addressed through co-creation tools such as thematic walks, timelines, serious games and images, revealing invisible power structures and relations. These tools expand the traditional representation of UM, acting as co-narrative devices, giving voice to non-human and human agency. The contribution presents some experimentations developed in the RETURN ULL in Bagnoli-Coroglio (Naples, Italy), where the former industrial area is interested by metabolic stasis and territorial instability: thirty years c.a. of abandonment have transformed the site into a contaminated brownfield, inaccessible to humans and conquered by non-humans.