Degrowth and the city

Abstract

Degrowth is both an academic debate and an activist call for a necessary socio-ecological transformation. It proposes a just and selective quantitative reduction of societal throughput to achieve ecological sustainability, social justice and individual well-being. What does such a transformation imply for cities, for place and space in general? Recently research has begun to explore this question, at the intersections of the degrowth project with geography, urban and planning studies. The present systematic review of this stream of the degrowth literature argues that contributions convincingly criticise mainstream solutions of sustainable urban development and portray an inspiring variety of local and sectoral alternatives. They also discuss the possibilities of spatial planning for degrowth. But the literature, related to a limited conceptualisation of space, lacks consideration for larger geographical scales (localism is prevalent). Also, limited attention is paid to material flows (the focus is on formal outcomes in the built environment) and there sometimes is a lack of reflection about positionality (with a tendency to apparently universalist solutions). Drawing in particular on Doreen Massey’s conceptualisation of the relationality of space and place, a conceptual framework is proposed for further research. It evidences questions neglected in the reviewed literature: how to spatialise degrowth beyond the local scale, not reducing the argument to a dualism between local = good and global = bad? And, how to transform not only the physicality of places but also the material and immaterial relations they are based on? The proposed framework, embracing a situated, relational and multiscalar understanding of space and its socio-ecological transformation, might be a first step in approaching these and other open questions in the debate on degrowth, cities and space.

Keywords:

• degrowth
• urban degrowth
• urban geography
• localism
• multiscalarity
• relational space

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Correction

Acknowledgements

This article would not have been possible without stimulating conversations with many friends and colleagues, among which: Marco Santangelo, Jin Xue, Anton Brokow-Loga, Katharina Bohnenberger and Silvio Cristiano. I would also like to thank the valuable and constructive critique of two anonymous reviewers and City’s editorial collective which helped to improve the article a lot.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2022.2051321)

Notes

1 A few contributions have been included which do not explicitly refer to degrowth but take up arguments that play a crucial role in the degrowth debate; e.g. contributions empirically showing the delusion of decoupling strategies in urban contexts. Not all chapters from the edited books are listed separately in Table 1.

2 It is impossible to directly translate Degrowth to German, thus ‘post-growth’ is used.

3 Currently, I am also part of a constituting international ‘Municipal Degrowth’ research and activism network.

4 While much degrowth literature connected to other fields, like political economy and ecological economics, develops proposals for the transformation of the global socio-economic system or for different national policies. But with little efforts to spatialise their proposals.

5 Personal discussions in the Italian degrowth movement confirm the importance that the localist project has also for many degrowth activists.

6 I owe this argument to Marco Santangelo.

7 www.lieferkettengesetz.de (Last access: December 2021).

8 This binary division in context-based and universalist approaches surely is not very fine-tuned and the attribution is disputable in some cases.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Karl Krähmer

Karl Krähmer is a PhD candidate in the Interuniversity Department of Regional and Urban Studies and Planning at Politecnico di Torino and Università degli Studi di Torino. Email: [email protected].