Overshoot Urbanization: Endless Growth, Excess Carbon, and Houston’s Planetary Reach

• In Event: Social Theory and Environmental Change

Abstract

This paper examines theoretical tensions between “metabolic” and “metropolitan” perspectives on urbanization and the environment through the case of growth and climate politics in Houston. These approaches, respectively, characterize the region by its position in global networks of the fossil fuel economy or by the internal dynamics of its inhabitants. However, material considerations of atmospheric carbon, toxic exposure, flooding, migration, and population growth complicate the presumed separateness between the outside and inside of this dichotomy. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research on the “carbon management,” “ClimateTech,” or “overshoot” economy, I show how Houston’s internal politics can be more clearly understood in relationship to global processes when we consider the cumulative work experience of highly mobile actors in the region. At the end of a planetary feedback effect, actors carry fossil experience forward in time and reground this experience as action in unequal metropolitan space. I identify social processes of cumulation, coordination, and competition that emerge out of these actors’ creative embrace of climactic excess as a business opportunity. I conclude by discussing the limits of this overshoot urbanization in the face of the enormity of the challenge.

Author

• Joshua Silver, The University of Chicago