Cobalt is an essential component of rechargeable lithium-ion batteries. The end product may be in your pocket, on your desk, in your garage, or even in your investment portfolio. It powers most electronic gadgets, including smartphones and laptops, and electric vehicles. But while they are often considered to be greener than their lead-acid counterparts, the major electronics and automotive companies that use them can expose themselves to serious risks. That’s because not only is the cobalt used in the batteries that power these devices obtained via a lengthy and complex supply chain, but cobalt mining has a high human toll and hazardous impact to environment. This research attempts to investigate the mining industry as an urban object of inquiry. The entry to this inquiry is engaged across multiple scales, from the mining cities as insatiable monster extracting resources, to the microscopic investigations of hazardous toxicities and their logistics that devastating impact the socio-environmental networks shaping the urban and its inhabitants as a whole. As Swyngedouw indicated, “this intermingling of material and symbolic things produces the vortexes of modern life, combines to produce a particular socio-environmental milieu that welds nature, society, and the city together in a deeply heterogenous, conflicting and often disturbing whole”. As a result, this text will study the metabolic socio- ecological process of mining activities as an entry point towards understanding the urbanization that grow from this very alarming ground of extractive landscape.
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