Post-Growth Planning

Cities Beyond the Market Economy

Federico Savini, António Ferreira, Kim von Schönfeld, Federico Savini, António Ferreira, Kim Carlotta von Schönfeld

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000584042
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Arquitectura
• Categoría: Planificación urbana y paisajismo

This book draws on a wide range of conceptual and empirical materials to identify and examine planning and policy approaches that move beyond the imperative of perpetual economic growth. It sketches out a path towards planning theories and practices that can break the cyclical process of urban expansion, crises, and recovery that negatively affect ecosystems and human lives.

To reduce the dramatic social and environmental impact of urbanization, this book offers both a critique of growth-led urban development and a prefiguration of ecologically regenerative and socially just ways of organizing cities and regions. It uncovers emerging possibilities for post-growth planning in the fields of collective housing, mobility, urban commoning, ecological land-use, urban–rural symbiosis, and alternative planning worldviews. It provides a toolkit of concepts and real-life examples for urban scholars, urbanists, activists, architects, and designers seeking to make cities prosper within planetary boundaries.

This book speaks to both experts and beginners in post-growth thinking. It concludes with a manifesto and glossary of key terms for urban scholars, students, and practitioners.

Part 1Beginning

1Uncoupling planning and economic growth: towards post-growth urban principlesAn introduction

Federico Savini, António Ferreira and Kim Carlotta von Schönfeld

DOI: 10.4324/9781003160984-2

1. Introduction

In contemporary capitalism, global increases in wealth and urbanisation are structurally coupled. The migration of large groups of people from rural to urban areas has become an index of developing economies’ GDP growth rate. In late-industrial countries, megaregions are becoming powerhouses of industrial development and dense concentrations of jobs for large volumes of transnational migrant labour. In early-industrial countries, urban regions have become the hubs of socio-cultural and financial innovation (Scott, 2019). The servers sustaining the platform economy are situated in cities; financial circuits prosper from real-estate transactions; commodity markets respond to cities’ fluctuating demand for batteries, photovoltaic panels, and turbines, to mention only a few examples.

Cities, then, have long been and remain growth machines (Molotch, 1976), the sites at which economic growth alliances are compelled to fuel national and global economies. If investments in urban amenities increase, national economies grow. If those investments stall, national economies fall into recession. Given cities’ economic centrality, it is unsurprising that they are widely seen as being both sites of economic innovation and the spaces in which its negative consequences can be addressed most effectively. Cities have been praised as a triumph of humanity’s capacity to find innovative solutions to contemporary socio-ecological challenges (Glaeser, 2011). Indeed, they have become laboratories in which new economic alliances and tools are prototyped. Energy-efficient housing; compact urban living; shared e-mobility systems; circular production; and digital consumption are increasingly understood as the pathways along which urban economies will grow in the future. Developments in these areas, it is hoped, will also help to prevent planetary socio-ecological collapse. This celebratory attitude towards urban economic growth and its putatively positive effects, however, obscures a much more complex and less optimistic socio-economic picture.

Urbanisation is a prime source of environmental degradation. Cities’ ecological footprints – which are five to ten times higher than any sustainable threshold – are just one among many indexes that testify to urban lifestyles’ massive impact on the environment (Baabou et al., 2017). Despite this, the celebration of the economic performance of cities and the ‘immaterial’ platform economy has made urbanists virtually blind to the extractive practices that sustain mainstream urbanisms. The neo-colonial approach to urbanisation sees areas of material extraction and production as functionally subordinate to the wealth of urbanised areas; rural areas are managed as ‘supply’ for urban economies, progressively eroding their ecological viability, biodiversity, and indigenous cultures. Undeveloped areas have become little more than sites for obtaining sand to produce concrete, rare materials for electronic equipment, and animal proteins to feed humans. These extractive practices have disseminated zoonotic diseases such as COVID-19 and are likely to continue doing so increasingly rapidly, with ever-more ominous impacts (UNEP, 2020).

This extractivist logic comes at dramatic costs for poorer populations both within and beyond urban areas. In urban economies, the quest to make land productive has become an essential means of fuelling economic growth. It has institutionalised an entrepreneurial approach to urban governance that makes governments constantly pursue economically valuable urban functions to the detriment of those that do not produce quantifiable economic outputs (Peck, 2016). Today, the provision of essential urban features and public services – public spaces such as green areas or playgrounds, as well as healthcare and social housing – rests on the incessant increase of the value of land and real estate. According to this logic, within current planning frameworks it is inevitable that cities pursue maximum land productivity. If they relinquish this aim, then they run the risk of failing to provide essential services for the well-being of their inhabitants.

The need for land productivity reproduces an urban geometry that devalues (or rather commodifies) history, standardising place identities that are embodied in indigenous communities and their urban fabrics. It compels neighbourhoods to specialise economically through place branding and expel activities and social groups that do not reproduce the advertised identity (Zukin, 1993). The hyper-diversity of contemporary urban areas glosses over the pauperisation, standardisation, and degradation of large housing estates and the socio-ecological neglect experienced at the urban fringes. On the one hand, the pursuit of economic productivity has complexified relations and activities in dense urban areas. On the other, however, it has simplified both natural ecosystems and social relations by exclusively maintaining economically quantifiable functions – to destructive effect. The pursuit of economic productivity standardises patterns of consumption and production; narrows the scope of creativity and innovation; increases the need for long-distance mobility for work and shopping; and produces peculiar forms of loneliness and stress-induced diseases (Okkels et al., 2017; von Schönfeld and Ferreira, 2021).

Under these conditions, planning (and planners) play a crucial role. Planning has provided the conditions for boosting urban economic productivity and has effectively lubricated the urban mechanisms that generate economic growth (Savini, 2021). Planners managed to develop and mobilise a large number of instruments to enhance places’ ability to compete for and attract investments. To do so, planners have nurtured private actors’ profit-seeking aspirations while endorsing private-led experiments in all sectors of city governance. In many countries, public governments have proactively fostered private initiative through large-scale public investments in city branding, infrastructural planning, cultural facilities, and ecosystem services. These developments are rooted in a longstanding historical trajectory that has conceptualised planning as a practice of ‘growth management’ (Grant, 2017). Urban planning policy has been, and remains, fundamentally geared to coupling ambitions for increased economic growth with socio-ecological improvements. Throughout its history, planning has succeeded in tightening the knot between economic and socio-ecological targets. In recent years, it has developed numerous instruments and approaches for tightening it still further, from citizen participation to co-production (Purcell, 2009). The link between growth and planning is so strong today that it is hardly possible for planners, governments, and their constituencies to question economic growth as the sine qua non condition of urban well-being.

Disentangling planning from this growth-dependent paradigm remains a key contemporary challenge. Although cities with long traditions of social-democratic public planning have succeeded in redistributing the wealth generated by urban growth, it has become almost self-evident that this paradigm undermines planning’s ability to address contemporary socio-ecological challenges. Urban economic growth is inevitably connected to the ecological damage increasingly wrought by urbanisation and the degradation of living conditions among poorer social groups. Attempts to decouple urban growth from its socio-ecological impacts have been ineffective, for their realisation ultimately depends on new economic output – thus perpetuating the actual source of the damage (Xue, 2015).

If it is to contribute effectively to a system that pursues prosperity within ecological limits in a socially fair way, planning must be emancipated from the imperative for economic growth. This volume establishes stepping-stones towards that emancipation by exploring post-growth planning theories and practices. In so doing, it develops a critique of the predominance of economic growth and market logics in planning institutions and toolkits. As we proceed to illustrate, planners can draw on an increasingly large body of literature from environmental economics, environmental geography, and political ecology to develop this critique. Nevertheless, given urban areas’ significant role in shaping economic conditions, planning research and practices also need to contribute to establishing a new economic logic, which goes beyond the growth imperative. To do so, planners must learn from the multiplicity of contemporary urban practices that prefigure and enact alternative urban futures. This logic needs to provide a realistic but utopian vision of urban prosperity, based on the principle of post-growth urbanisation. It also needs to be backed up by a matching toolkit of planning instruments. This vision must decouple socio- ecological prosperity from the imperative for economic growth and put socio- ecological justice at the forefront of planning practices. In practical terms, this agenda raises two important questions: what would a post-growth logic involve and how can it inform alternative ways of planning urban areas?

2. What is post-growth? A brief outline of an emerging field

Engaging effectively on prefigurative post-growth planning theories and practices requires looking at key debates in post-growth thinking outside the discipline of planning. Accordingly, we now plunge into some of the fundamentals of this field.

Advocates of post-growth thinking tend to agree upon the necessity to abandon – or at least treat very sceptically – the mainstream use of aggregate indicators of wealth such as GDP. They do not consider such indicators sufficiently valid to serve as constructive measures by which public policymakers can assess human prosperity and development (Jackson, 2017; Raworth, 2017; Kallis, 2018). For example, the use of GDP growth as an indicator of public policy success has been associated with the risk of promoting ‘uneconomic growth’ (Daly, 1999). This corresponds to a damaging situation in which the environmental, social, and even economic costs of maintaining continuous GDP growth exceed the benefits of doing so.

A fundamental claim of post-growth thinking is that aggregate econometric indicators (such as GDP) motivate policies that exploit everything that such indicators can quantify, and destroy everything that they cannot. As a result, not converting altruistic social relations into commodified services, which can be effectively counted as contributions to GDP, is considered a sign of underdevelopment; not fully exploiting natural areas so as to produce environmental resources is perceived as inefficient; and lastly, not converting money itself into a financial product to be traded for profit in global markets is considered a missed opportunity. According to this paradoxically circular belief system, economies need to be more efficient in order to grow, efficiency results from commodification, and commodification equals growth. It has led policymakers uncritically to promote strategies that downgrade and threaten social relations, the environment, and the economy itself (Fraser, 2014).

Although post-growth thinkers generally agree on this critique, there is as yet no consensus on what a post-growth society might entail and what exactly would define it (Cosme et al., 201...