Socioplastics 11999 A Circular System Is Not Automatically Just
Urban ecological rhetoric often treats circularity as evidence of responsibility. Water is reused, organic waste becomes compost and vegetation is expected to provide cooling. MetabolicLoop examines whether a technically circular system also addresses the obligations and relations that sustain it. Material flows may close on a diagram while labour conditions, land relations, consent and decision-making remain outside the representation. The marker places ecological circulation alongside the social and political arrangements through which a cycle is produced and maintained. Stefano Mancuso’s writing on plant life challenges assumptions about vegetal passivity. Kyle Powys Whyte’s Indigenous climate scholarship addresses colonial harm, collective relationships and responsibilities extending across generations. Their work emerges from different intellectual traditions and should remain in productive relation rather than being compressed into one framework. Together they raise a question about ecological design: how does a system account for both material processes and the obligations that accompany intervention? A description of metabolism can explain flows; it does not by itself establish their legitimacy. Imagine compost supplied to a redesigned park from waste processed by workers elsewhere. A material-flow diagram may show organic matter returning to soil, while the labour, transport, consent and maintenance conditions remain unrecorded. A study could draw two linked networks: one following matter and energy, the other following decision rights, working conditions and responsibility. Their relation would show where circularity depends on arrangements outside its technical boundary. The example is a research proposition, not a report about a specific park. MetabolicLoop makes the limits of ecological diagrams available for analysis. It asks what must be included for a closed loop to count as a responsible relation and which effects remain beyond its boundary. The marker holds material description and social obligation together without assuming that one can substitute for the other. A useful ecological account would show how matter circulates, who maintains the cycle, whose knowledge informs its design and who bears its consequences. The open question is what a seemingly complete loop needs to leave visible in order to remain accountable.
REFERENCES
Mancuso, S. and Viola, A. (2015) Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence. Washington, DC: Island Press.
Whyte, K.P. (2018) “Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral Dystopias and Fantasies of Climate Change Crises”, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 1(1–2), pp. 224–242.
CITE AS
Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics, LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid.
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