14 April 2026 | 6:15 p.m. | PEG 2.G107

Maan Barua (Cambridge University)

What does urbanization look like if we begin not with the built environment, but with how life itself is reshaped and optimized – biologically, economically, and politically – through industrialization? This talk brings urban studies into conversation with renewed interest in metabolism across the social sciences. Focusing on industrial poultry production in urban India, it shows how the demand for cheap meat has reorganized agrarian sectors and produced expansive forms of urbanization that blur urban-rural divides. Broiler chickens now outweigh all wild birds combined, while the vast quantities of feed they require drive monoculture farming, chemical use, and environmental degradation. This is not simply an agricultural story, but a political one about how urban life is constituted and governed.

Poultry production generates material surplus, contributes to climate change and produces industrialized ecosystems that extend across territories. In much of the Global South, these transformations unfold through piecemeal coordination and residual governance, where the material consequences of optimizing life remain unevenly managed and often unresolved. The result is not urban metabolism, but 
metabolic urbanization:
 urban form driven by the large-scale management of animal bodies, human labor, and landscapes. The talk is accompanied by a visual ethnography.

Bio 
Maan Barua works on the politics, ontologies and economies of the living and material world. His current research is on metabolic urbanization and the politics of city-making. Maan is the author of Lively Cities: Reconfiguring Urban Ecology (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) and Plantation Worlds (Duke University Press, 2024). He was the PI on an ERC Horizon 2020 Starting Grant on Urban Ecologies, (2018-2025) and is a University Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Cambridge. Maan has recently completed a book on volatile urban conditions, titled An Amphibious Urbanism, and this is part of a wider project looking at metabolism.