Timber,power,and the metabolic city: Alpine frontiers in the Swiss inner south

Abstract

This paper advances a theoretical reflection on the entanglement between territorial governance, extractivism, and urban metabolism through the case of nineteenth-century timber trade in Ticino, on the Alpine border between Switzerland and Lombardy. Building on debates around planetary urbanisation and the critique of methodological cityism, it argues for a perspective that understands operational landscapes as historically contingent and politically negotiated formations. Through a micro-historical analysis of a 1810 dispute in the village of Tegna, the paper re-constructs how local actors and timber merchants engaged in struggles over value, legitimacy, and control of natural resources. The notion of a ‘timber republic’ is proposed to conceptualise situations in which state institutions are informally captured and re-oriented to serve extractivist interests – thus extending the urban metabolism into peripheral territories. This concept provides a lens for examining how informal alliances, legal ambiguities, and socio-ecological transformations co-produce governance regimes across scales. By situating the Alps within global histories of extraction and state formation, the paper suggests that frontier zones are not marginal spaces but laboratories where the infrastructural and political conditions of capitalism are constantly re-negotiated. Ultimately, it calls for an inter-scalar, inter-sectional approach to operational landscapes attentive to local agency and epistemic pluralism.