Operational landscapes designate the more-than-city territories of primary production, circulation, and waste assimilation that sustain urban life. The concept underscores an understanding of urbanization that is not confined to the city but as a dialectical relationship between processes of concentrated urbanization, the clustering of people, capital, and infrastructures in dense settlements; and processes of extended urbanization, the production and transformation of peripheral, infrastructural, and resource landscapes that sustain them. Neither can exist without the other: no urban core survives without far-reaching metabolic infrastructures, and no operational landscape takes form outside the logics of urban metabolism. They are mutually constitutive, locked in what a condition of geometabolic interdependence. Operational landscapes thus crystallize the spatial fabric of extended urbanization: they materialize the metabolic reach of cities through vast, often distant networks that provide food, energy, materials, and water, while absorbing their waste.
Historically, such landscapes of metabolic support have been spatialized through the concept of hinterland, imagined in classical models such as von Thünen’s isolated state or Christaller’s central place theory as territorially bounded zones, coherently organized through proximity and articulating city and countryside in direct relation. Yet while regional hinterlands were indeed important, they never fully represented the metabolism of urbanization, which has often unfolded through multiscalar networks. Despite this, the hinterland imaginary has long persisted as a spatial model that has proven difficult to transcend. Under conditions of planetary urbanization, however, this imaginary collapses. Contemporary metabolisms are increasingly organized not through cohesive or proximal hinterlands but through dispersed, overlapping, and distanciated circuits that bind distant territories into cascading metabolic webs. In this sense, the idea of hinterland fails to capture the fragmented yet systemic metabolic infrastructures of contemporary urbanization. The concept of operational landscapes addresses this gap by designating the dispersed, specialized geographies through which extended urbanization materializes.
Operational landscapes are not equivalent to all spaces of extended urbanization. What defines them is their systemic function as spatial infrastructures of primary production, circulation, or waste. At the core of operational landscapes lies a metabolic logic that merges biophysical processes with capitalist accumulation. This logic operates through the interplay between the economies of scale that define modern systems of primary production and the extraction of what Moore conceptualizes as ecological surplus: the unpaid work appropriated from both human and more-than-human systems—plants, animals, soils, water cycles—within the process of capitalist production. Unlike wage labor, which is compensated, ecological surplus is appropriated without cost: photosynthesis, nutrient cycling, the metabolic conversion of feed into meat, the reproductive labor of soils and ecosystems—all are forms of natural work mobilized for capital, but not compensated.
Operational landscapes are organized to extract this surplus. Industrial agriculture extracts caloric and nutrient value from plants with minimal labor input by harnessing the unpaid work of sun, soil, and microbes. Livestock systems conscript the metabolic labor of animals to convert feed into protein. Waste landscapes depend on ecosystems to absorb pollutants without compensation. But as Moore notes, ecological surplus has a tendency to fall: soil fertility declines, aquifers are depleted, microbial communities collapse. As natural systems are degraded, capital must substitute them with paid inputs: synthetic fertilizers, antibiotics, irrigation, energy. This interplay of appropriation and capitalization across operational landscapes is enhanced through the diffusion of economies of scale that allow capital to amortize input costs across greater volumes of output. This pursuit of economies of scale reinforces specialization and territorial homogenization. As a result, operational landscapes often appear as massive, simplified zones: grids of corn,ranks of swine, swathes of lithium extraction basins. While they are not equivalent to sacrifice zones, they can produce them: territories where ecological degradation, contamination, and dispossession are so concentrated that social and environmental reproduction is compromised. Operational landscapes embody not ecological resilience, but the optimization of productivity and surplus extraction at scale.
This dynamic exposes a structural contradiction: The more operational landscapes become operationalized, the less they are able to reproduce themselves, as they become geometabolically interdependent to other landscapes for their own support, not unlike the urban concentrations they sustain. This cascading spatial logic of exhaustion and substitution forces operational landscapes to be assembled into broader interdependent matrices of metabolic support often situated at different phases of ecological surplus availability or depletion, and linked through global commodity chains to each other and to cities. Unlike traditional hinterlands, these assemblages are not necessarily territorially contiguous around, nor directly linked to, specific urban cores. Rather, they are disarticulated yet operationally connected, held together through circulatory infrastructures, logistical networks, and financial flows that abstract work, human and more-than-human, across geographies. In such configurations, metabolic flows are continuously rerouted: exhausted landscapes are compensated with inputs from others, while new frontiers are drawn into the system to sustain falling productivity elsewhere. These multiscalar assemblages of operational landscapes can be conceptualized as hinterglobes. If operational landscapes designate the constitutive metabolic elements of extended urbanization, hinterglobes refer to their systemic assemblages across planetary scales.
The systemic articulation of operational landscapes into hinterglobes constitutes the very ground of uneven development and socio-ecological inequality under planetary urbanization. These formations are not neutral infrastructures that simply sustain cities, but engines of depletion and dispossession, displacing ecological costs onto peripheral or marginalized territories while concentrating metabolic benefits elsewhere. Their logic is inherently unsustainable, organized around the perpetual reconfiguration and externalization of metabolic costs, and as such they cannot provide the basis for any serious project of sustainable or resilient urbanization. To confront the socio-ecological crises of the present, it is therefore necessary to move beyond the operational landscapes and their hinterglobe assemblages, and to imagine alternative configurations of urbanization that break with the exploitative geographies on which they rest.