Accounting for greenhouse gas emissions of materials at the urban scale-relating existing process life cycle assessment studies to urban material and waste composition

This chapter examines maintenance in two case studies of climate change experiments in housing in Bangalore (India) and Monterrey (Mexico). Scholarship in urban political ecology has drawn attention to the ways in which the conditions of urban life are structurally produced and maintained through the continual circulation of capital, resources and nature. The first case study is a gated development of 91 eco-homes for high-income professionals in the urban periphery of Bangalore (India) called Towards Zero-Carbon Development (T-Zed). The second case study is a social-housing development of 51 houses in Monterrey (Mexico) called Vivienda de Diseño Ambiental (ViDA). The most fundamental difference between T-Zed and ViDA is that they are targeted at different consumer groups. Metabolic adjustment refers to a series of discursive and spatial processes that are needed to adjust the experiment to the conditions of urban development in which it emerges, while resignifying the experiment as a symbol of the intended structural configurations.