The Material Side of Modern Cities: Energy, Industry, and Infrastructure

Cities are made of stuff. Concrete, steel, electrical cables, water pipes, asphalt, glass, and the energy that flows through all of it. When urban scholars use the word materialities, they are pointing to exactly this physical fabric of urban life: the objects, infrastructures, and energy systems that make a city function. But materialities are never neutral. The way a city is built, what it is built from, who it is built for, and where investment flows all carry deep social meaning. To understand a modern city, you have to look past its image and examine its material body. This post explores three lenses for doing that: the contrast between pre-industrial and industrial cities, David Harvey’s account of how capitalism reshapes the urban landscape, and feminist critiques that ask who urban spaces are really designed to serve.

From muscle power to machine power
The shift to inanimate energy
The new urban form and its costs
Capitalism and the urban built environment
The circuits of capital
Why capitalism keeps building cities
Feminist critiques of urban materiality
Cities designed by and for men
Material feminism and the home
The Indian context
Why materialities matter

From muscle power to machine power

The single biggest material difference between old cities and modern ones is the source of energy. Pre-industrial cities ran almost entirely on what scholars call animate energy – the muscle power of humans and animals. According to the sociologist Gideon Sjoberg, whose work remains a reference point in urban studies, preindustrial cities depended on animate sources of energy, which kept production small in scale and relatively inefficient. Land transport moved at walking pace. As a result, these cities stayed small, compact, and dense.

This energy constraint shaped everything. Without steam engines, electricity, or mechanised factories, work was done by hand or by animals turning mills and driving pumps. Production was always limited to what human hands could craft, which capped how large a city could grow and how much it could produce. Goods were largely made locally, the labour force was small, and most people lived in tight, local worlds.

The shift to inanimate energy

The Industrial Revolution broke this ceiling by introducing inanimate energy. The development of steam power and, later, electricity dramatically increased the scale and efficiency of manufacturing, and it transformed transport as well. As scholars note, these new energy sources enabled workers to commute, which made the large-scale separation of home and work possible and allowed much larger industrial cities to grow. Labour-saving machinery replaced muscle. Factories replaced workshops.

The materials themselves changed too. Where older cities relied on locally available timber, stone, and brick, industrial cities demanded vast and growing quantities of coal, iron, copper, fibres, and intermediate goods. Mining sectors expanded, ports modernised, and railways were built to connect interior regions to international markets. The city became a node in a much wider network of material extraction and exchange. India’s own colonial-era cities like Mumbai (then Bombay) and Kolkata (then Calcutta) grew exactly this way – around ports, railways, and textile mills that linked them to global trade circuits.

The new urban form and its costs

Industrial cities also looked and functioned differently. Manufacturing became the dominant economic activity, and as one overview puts it, industrial cities often led to significant air and water pollution, polarised social structures, and distinct land-use patterns. The dense factory districts, working-class neighbourhoods, and separation between residential and industrial zones that define so many cities today are products of this material transformation. The modern city, in this view, is essentially a machine for processing energy and materials at a scale that earlier cities could never have imagined.

Capitalism and the urban built environment

If energy and materials explain how cities grew, the geographer David Harvey offers a powerful explanation of why capitalist cities keep getting rebuilt, expanded, and torn down. His central idea is that urbanisation is not a side effect of capitalism but one of its core survival mechanisms. Harvey set out to understand urbanisation through the lens of capital accumulation, treating accumulation and class struggle as, in his words, two sides of the same coin.

The circuits of capital

Harvey, building on the work of Henri Lefebvre, described how capital flows through different circuits. The primary circuit is the realm of production, where surplus value is created through factories, machines, and workers making goods. The problem is that competition pushes capitalists to produce as much as possible, which eventually leads to overaccumulation – too many goods and too much capital chasing too few profitable outlets. When this happens, profits threaten to collapse.

The solution, Harvey argued, is to switch capital into the secondary circuit: the built environment. As scholars summarising his model explain, when capitalist production edges toward periodic crises of overaccumulation, capital “switches” from production into the production of the urban built environment as a way to absorb surplus capital and temporarily avert crisis. Surplus money that cannot be profitably invested in making more goods gets poured instead into long-lasting physical assets – housing, offices, roads, ports, durables, and machinery.

Why capitalism keeps building cities

This is the heart of Harvey’s argument. As one appreciation of his work puts it, capital accumulation necessarily generates excess surpluses that must be channelled into fixed investments in the long-lasting structures and infrastructure of the built environment – meaning capitalism necessarily creates cities and other landscapes. The construction of metros, expressways, shopping malls, and high-rise housing is therefore not random. It is one way the system handles its own internal contradictions.

But there is a catch. The built environment that serves capitalism in one era can become an obstacle in the next. The built environment must suit its function of advancing production, consumption, and accumulation, yet urban places can become barriers to the very change that capitalist competition demands. This is why cities are repeatedly demolished and rebuilt – old industrial districts are flattened for office towers, low-rise neighbourhoods give way to luxury apartments. Harvey added a tertiary circuit too, covering investment in science, technology, and social spending on the reproduction of labour power, though he gave it less attention.

India offers a vivid demonstration. The flood of investment into real estate, IT parks, expressways, and metro rail across cities like Bengaluru, Gurugram, and Hyderabad reflects exactly the kind of capital switching into the built environment that Harvey described. When surplus capital cannot find returns elsewhere, land and construction become the destination – which also helps explain recurring property booms and the displacement of older settlements.

Feminist critiques of urban materiality

Harvey’s analysis focuses on class and capital. Feminist urban scholars add a crucial dimension that this account tends to overlook: gender. Their central claim is that the physical fabric of cities is not gender-neutral. It has been shaped by assumptions about who works, who cares for children, who moves through public space, and who stays home. As the writer Jane Darke memorably put it, our cities are patriarchy written in stone, brick, glass, and concrete.

Cities designed by and for men

The feminist critique of urban planning that developed in the 1970s argued that the people who designed cities encoded a particular vision of social life into their plans. As one account explains, this critique demonstrated how urban planners created gendered environments predominantly suited to the needs of men and the heteronormative family. The underlying assumption was that men went out to do paid work while women stayed home to manage the household and raise children. Planning was then built around the male commuter – the breadwinner travelling between a suburban home and a city-centre workplace.

This produced a sharp separation between the private domestic sphere, coded as feminine, and the public productive sphere, coded as masculine. The very separation of home and work that industrialisation made possible became, in the feminist reading, a spatial trap. Women’s unpaid domestic and care labour was rendered invisible because the city was not designed to support it. Sprawling, single-use zoning, for example, makes the multi-stop, caregiving journeys that women disproportionately make far more difficult than a simple commute.

Material feminism and the home

One of the most striking strands of this thinking is material feminism, which targeted the design of domestic space itself. Material feminists argued that the isolated, privatised household – where each woman cooks, cleans, and cares alone – was a deliberate spatial arrangement, not a natural one. They advocated, as one study notes, restructuring household spaces to socialise domestic tasks, proposing communal kitchens, shared childcare, and collective laundries that would redistribute the burden of housework.

This connects to the influential work of Dolores Hayden, who in 1980 asked what a non-sexist city might look like. The question pushed planners to imagine cities designed equally for men and women rather than around a male default. More recently, Leslie Kern’s book Feminist City revived these debates for a new generation, arguing that a woman’s experience of the city – how she moves, when she feels safe, what choices are available to her – is fundamentally shaped by her gender identity.

The Indian context

These critiques are sharply relevant in Indian cities. Research on gender and Indian urban planning finds that the built environment is often not women-friendly, citing problems like the unavailability of public transport during non-peak hours and the lack of street lighting. Poor lighting, inadequate sanitation, and unsafe transport restrict women’s mobility and shape where and when they feel able to go. The data backs this up: a study cited in analyses of Indian urban governance found that 84 percent of women in Delhi and Mumbai used public or shared transport compared to 63 percent of men, yet transport systems are rarely planned around women’s travel patterns.

Government responses have leaned heavily on technology. Under the Smart Cities Mission, women’s safety is repeatedly invoked, but critics argue the approach is narrow. As a critique from IIT Bombay’s policy centre notes, solutions focus on surveillance technologies that fail to address the root causes of violence, while technology itself is rarely gender-neutral. Throwing CCTV cameras at the problem treats women as objects to be watched rather than citizens whose needs should shape the city from the design stage. UN Women has similarly emphasised that the design of smart cities must be gender-responsive and consider the differential needs of women, including basics like sanitation, since the lack of safe toilets disproportionately exposes women to risk.

Some promising alternatives are emerging. Gender-responsive budgeting efforts have begun integrating women’s lived experiences directly into municipal planning. In one Indian initiative, this approach contributed in its first year to the installation of 65 streetlights, the sanctioning of 425 more across 152 locations, and investments in safer bus stops, pedestrian pathways, and public toilets. The lesson is that material interventions work best when women’s priorities are built into budgets before decisions are made, not added afterward as a reporting formality.

Why materialities matter

Reading these three perspectives together reveals something important. The material city is the outcome of overlapping forces: the energy revolution that made large industrial cities possible, the logic of capital that keeps rebuilding the urban landscape to absorb surplus, and the gendered assumptions baked into where streets, homes, and transport lines are placed. None of these is neutral. A streetlight, a metro line, a zoning boundary, or an isolated kitchen each tells a story about power – about whose work counts, whose movement is planned for, and whose surplus capital is being parked in concrete. Looking at a city’s material body, rather than just its skyline, is how urban studies uncovers the social order written into the physical world.

What do you think? When you walk through your own city, can you spot infrastructure that was clearly designed with one kind of resident in mind? And if surplus capital keeps reshaping the built environment, who decides what gets built – and who gets to live with the consequences?

References

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The Material Side of Modern Cities: Energy, Industry, and Infrastructure

Table of Contents

From muscle power to machine power 🔗

The shift to inanimate energy 🔗

The new urban form and its costs 🔗

Capitalism and the urban built environment 🔗

The circuits of capital 🔗

Why capitalism keeps building cities 🔗

Feminist critiques of urban materiality 🔗

Cities designed by and for men 🔗

Material feminism and the home 🔗

The Indian context 🔗

Why materialities matter 🔗