Rotten capital: Rethinking urban metabolism with mold

This article brings mold metabolisms into dialogue with urban metabolism in urban political ecology (UPE) and animal geographies by conceiving mold and its spores as vital objects to think with for an enriched understanding of a more-than-human urban metabolism. Both research strands, UPE and animal geographies, offer several conjunctions: the city as a common contact zone, lively commodities, and animate capital. Mold fungi understood in terms of their most vital metabolistic function (growth and reproduction) in regard to rot, decomposition, and their transformative capacity of changing states between airborne spores and spatialized colonies will be related to some of the most significant objects of research in urban metabolism like water, built structures, commodities, waste, and capital. This, then, helps to flesh out the concept of Rotten Capital that is organized around two key categories of critical engagement: first, Rotten Capital as a form of urban metabolism that (de-)territorializes microbial mobilities, effecting the (de-)valuation of labor, commodities and capital (dis)investments; secondly, Rotten Capital as a form of (un)intended obsolescence and creative destruction in the wider logic of capital circulation and accumulation, in which mold is functionally similar to but accelerates “time” in the decay of value. Thus, three different moldy trajectories (mold as hydrological cyborg fungus, mold's spatial fix, and mold's biosemiotic switch) will be explained in discussing mold as a potent driver entangled in more-than-human urban metabolisms that can become profitably utilized in different directions in the form of Rotten Capital.