Fat city.

• Author: Marvin, Simon
• Position: Philadelphia - Weight

The global cultural obsession with losing weight is spreading rapidly, as attested by the hundreds of "miracle" diets, the thousands of weight-loss products, and the near-universal excitement over the claimed discovery of the "fat gene." Hardly a day goes by without some headline story about obesity. And in fact, although fat is not all bad--it performs important functions, such as cushioning, insulation, and energy storage--in excess, fat rightly causes much concern. Particularly when bodies become obese, fat is associated with a worrisome list of health problems. The World Health Organization (WHO) reports a "greatly increased risk" of diabetes, gall bladder disease, hypertension, dyslipidemia, insulin resistance, breathlessness, and sleep apnea; "moderately increased risk" of coronary heart diseases, osteoarthritis, hyperuricemia, and gout; and "slightly increased risk" of cancers, reproductive hormone abnormalities, polycystic ovary syndrome, impaired fertility, low back pain, increased anesthetic risk, and fetal defects (arising from maternal obesity). And worldwide obesity levels are on the rise. WHO reports that while there were an estimated 200 million obese adults worldwide in 1995, there are now over 300 million. Such is the concern internationally that WHO launched the International Obesity Task Force in 1996.

Despite the alarm, there has been little discussion about the wider context of fat or its mobilities: the ways fat moves around. We want to turn attention away from obesity to look at obecity, that is, the processes through which fat travels through bodies, infrastructures, and cities, and the growing problems that encounters with fat generate. The social geographer David Harvey argues that "cities are constituted out of the flows of energy, water, food, commodities, money, people, and all the other necessities that sustain life." What role does fat play in this context? Can fat literally block up the city? Has the balance between fat as a resource and fat as a waste product become disrupted? And if so, what strategies are in place to tackle obecity? We argue that to understand the mobilities of fat in a city context metaphors of urban metabolism become important. This article discusses the wider crisis of fat that is blocking up the city and the close interconnections between strategies for slimming down bodies, infrastructures, and the city as a whole.

Emergence

The United States leads the world in the incidence of obesity. Official figures suggest that one in five children is overweight, 60 percent of the general population is overweight, and 21 percent is obese. Obesity has more than doubled in the last two decades and is now rising by 5 percent per year. However, obesity is not evenly distributed; more than half of black women in low socio-economic groups are obese, for instance. Obesity is estimated to account for 12 percent ($100 billion) of U.S. health care costs. The United States provides a dubious benchmark for the rest of the western world, suggesting where other countries might be heading.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In response to these trends, the health magazine Men's Fitness set out to measure, city by city, "the relative environmental factors that either support an active, fit lifestyle, or nudge people towards a pudgier sedentary existence." Using existing surveys and data, the magazine's analysis ranked the 50 largest U.S. cities according to per-capita numbers or rates of several factors, including gyms and sporting-goods stores, health club memberships, exercise, fruit and vegetable consumption, alcohol consumption, smoking, television watching, junk food outlets, and recreation facilities. Obesity levels were scored by drawing on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion.

One result is that, ever since the survey was launched, U.S...