The more-than-living city: sewage treatment, geontopower and the urban metabolism of Non/Life

In this article, we develop the concept of urban metabolism of Non/Life. More precisely, by linking Povinelli’s notion of geontopower to Urban Political Ecology (UPE), we aim to broaden the scope of UPE and ask how processes of urbanization are connected to the governance of transitions between Life and Nonlife. While previous work from UPE has focused on the relationship between society and nature, interpreting the emergence of urban sewage infrastructure as a process of taming and exploiting the natural, we argue that urbanization and sanitation are based not only on the separation of society and nature, but also of Life and Nonlife. Starting from this, we analyse the historical development of sewage treatment in Leipzig, Germany. Building on archival work, sensory ethnography and qualitative interviews, we carve out three phases of sewage treatment that target, in different ways, the specific non/living qualities of sewage. We argue that the city’s growth is built on an ever-greater control of transitions between Life and Nonlife. Beyond our empirical example, the article is an invitation to consider cities from a “more-than-living” angle that does not center on the spheres of Life nor Nonlife, but foregrounds the multiple transitions and hybrids between them.