The design disciplines have always recognized the potential within a critical understanding of urban metabolism to shape spatial strategies, from Patrick Geddes's Valley Section to the megastructures of the Japanese Metabolists. Historically confined to the regional scale, today's generalized urbanization is characterized by an unprecedented complexity and planetary upscaling of metabolic relations.

Most contemporary discussions of metabolism have failed to integrate formal, spatial, and material attributes. Technoscientific approaches have been limited to a performative...