Dung, Death, and Disease: Livestock and Capitalist Urbanization from the early Nineteenth Century to the Present

Item

Title
Dung, Death, and Disease: Livestock and Capitalist Urbanization from the early Nineteenth Century to the Present
Description
Nonhuman animals are a key parameter for processes of urbanization, but have been marginalized in both mainstream and critical frameworks of urban theory and design. This dissertation critically analyzes this proposition in relation to the history and theory of Western urbanization, using livestock production in the United States as a lens. Four core areas of engagement form the theoretical landscape of this analysis: the persistent nature/city binary in theory and design; modernity as an ideological force reifying city and nature in theory and practice; creative destruction as the propellant force driving machinations in the built environment; and, urban metabolism as a conceptualization of urbanization that offers a counter-narrative to fixed spatial boundaries. Each has played a prominent role in how we think about cities and urbanization in theory and design over the last hundred and fifty years.

Underpinning this exploration is a twofold hypothesis. First, while there has been vigorous debate over what constitutes ‘the urban’, an unexamined anthropocentric core in urban theory and allied design disciplines remains under explored, leaving nonhuman animals black-boxed. Second, while ‘nature’ has in recent years played new and larger roles in discourses like urban political ecology, landscape architecture, and architecture - its use in extant literature has tended to be narrowly focused, reducing the heterogeneity of the nonhuman to an undifferentiated mass. This dissertation argues that the coupled reduction of nature as roughly synonymous to being ‘green’, with the black-boxing of nonhuman animals, produces serious epistemological, analytical, and empirical blind spots in our understanding of urbanization. If we are to take seriously the possibility that we have entered a period of generalized urbanization - a period in need of an urban theory without an outside - then we necessarily need to bring nonhuman animals into our frame of reference, and work to incorporate them into our conceptual and theoretical apparatus.

Organized around thematic concerns that foregrounds livestock bodies as a register in which cycles of capitalist urbanization in the United States can be understood, dung, death, and disease are explored to gain analytical clarity with regard to the proposition that nonhuman animals have been, and continue to be, important to processes of urbanization. The position developed in the pages to follow is that ‘urban’, ‘nature’, and ‘urban nature’ operates beyond ‘good’ nature, and that the metabolic processes and biological labor of livestock – a kind of ‘bad’ nature - pulse through the creative destruction of the urban fabric. By illuminating these dimensions of the ‘urban’, ‘nature’, and ‘urban nature’, we can begin to render into existence a theory of urbanization as processes formed through manifold and intersecting human and nonhuman worlds.
Creator
Chieffalo, Michael
Subject
Creative Destruction
Livestock
Modernity
Urban Metabolism
Urban Nature
Urban Theory
Urban planning
Design
Geography
Contributor
Brenner, Neil
Dumpelmann, Sonja
Blau, Eve
Date
2021-09-14T04:48:57Z
2021
2021-02-10
2021-03
2021-09-14T04:48:57Z
Type
Thesis or Dissertation
text
Format
application/pdf
application/pdf
Identifier
Chieffalo, Michael. 2021. Dung, Death, and Disease: Livestock and Capitalist Urbanization from the early Nineteenth Century to the Present. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard Graduate School of Design.
28317499
https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37369520
Language
en
Item sets
Graduate School of Design