Urbanizing degrowth: Five steps towards a Radical Spatial Degrowth Agenda for planning in the face of climate emergency

Abstract

We call for coupling degrowth with urban studies and planning agendas as an academically salient and politically urgent endeavour. Our aim is threefold: to explore ways for ‘operationalising’ degrowth concepts into urban and regional everyday spatial practices; to sketch pathways for taking degrowth conceptually and methodologically beyond localised experiments and inform larger scale planning practices and international agendas; and to critically assess the multiple ways in which such a radical urban degrowth agenda will have to differ in the Global North and in the Global South. We outline five steps for such a programmatic, yet paradigmatic, urban degrowth agenda. These are: (1) grounding current degrowth debates within their historical–geographical context; (2) engaging (planning) institutions in linking degrowth practices to urbanisation policies; (3) examining how urban insurgent degrowth alliances can be scaled up without co-optation; (4) focusing on the role of experts and professionals in bringing degrowth principles into everyday urban practice; and (5) prefiguring how degrowth agendas can confront the diverse and unequal urban social relations and uneven outcomes in the Global North and South.

Scaling-up degrowth: Re-imagining institutional responses to climate change

“…Degrowth can also deconstruct the resilience and certification approaches in these mainstream policies through collective, convivial and materially contextual practices, particularly in urban housing. The paper thus contributes pathways for operationalising, spatialising and even institutionalising degrowth practices (Kaika et al, 2023), vis-à-vis Agenda 2030 and NUA.…”

“…With the local scale being the main focus of degrowth debates and practices (D’Alisa et al, 2014; Xue, 2022), degrowth’s potential to influence different scales of institutional practice is not adequately examined (Knuth et al, 2020). This special issue is a call to ‘couple degrowth with urban studies and planning agendas’ (Kaika et al, 2023). For Demaria et al (2013: 205), ‘it remains unclear how ecological transformation might actually take place at macro scales and which institutions should be involved’.…”

“…Rescaling and regionalising such networks would aim to reduce the footprints of industrial production, intermediate and final consumption, thereby challenging the scales of unequal exchange. It would also highlight the redistributive mechanisms and planetary boundaries of resource use under degrowth (Kaika et al, 2023).…”

An empirical test of measures of housing degrowth: Learning from the limited experience of England and Wales, 1981–2011

“…Overall, there is room for more research on how degrowth in housing could be defined and measured, and for empirical evidence on whether it has been or can be achieved (Kaika et al, 2023). Concepts and measures which can apply to existing housing, mostly with conventional ownership, governance and construction, will be particularly valuable, as this is where most people live and where the biggest effect on total growth or degrowth is likely to be generated over the short- and medium-term.…”

Maintaining autonomy: Urban degrowth and the commoning of housing

“…The degrowth critique of contemporary capitalism is premised on the study (and pursuit) of autonomy (for a review, see Asara et al, 2013; Kaika et al, 2023). From a degrowth perspective, autonomy means the emancipation of society from the hegemony of the imperative of growth and its ideology of competition and productivity (Fotopoulos, 2007).…”