Drawing from cellular biology, Hannibal Newsom introduces the concept of Urban Autophagy—a speculative yet actionable paradigm that reimagines sustainable urbanism through the metaphor of biological autophagy, the regenerative process by which organisms self-consume dead or damaged components to promote health and longevity; applying this model to urban environments, the essay frames cities not as extractive entities dependent on external inputs but as metabolic systems capable of cannibalising their own spatial, material and infrastructural excesses for renewal and resilience, challenging the linear resource flows and globalised supply chains that currently dominate urban growth; Newsom outlines existing urban mining, adaptive reuse, and infrastructural retrofitting as nascent practices that already echo this principle, but argues for a systematic, policy-driven adoption of autophagic logics that foreground decay, obsolescence and embedded value not as failures but as latent resources; the essay proposes a methodological triad: identification of endogenous resource nodes (e.g. abandoned buildings, underused streetscapes), strategic deconstruction for material and spatial reintegration, and public imaginaries that reframe decay as opportunity—thus transforming waste into agency; examples include cities reconfiguring vacant lots into urban agriculture loops, converting former industrial districts into carbon sinks or creating closed-loop housing economies using materials sourced from demolition within a city’s own perimeter; fundamentally, Urban Autophagy offers an ontological inversion of growth, prioritising immanent transformation over expansion, and requiring a new aesthetics, ethics and epistemology of urban stewardship aligned with planetary boundaries; in doing so, it envisions not merely greener cities but self-aware urban metabolisms capable of sustaining themselves within the limits of environmental and geopolitical turbulence. Newsom, H. (2022) Urban Autophagy: A New Imaginary for Twenty-First Century Urban Growth. The Plan Journal, 7(1). https://doi.org/10.15274/tpj.2022.07.01.5
