A revolution of how we plan and manage space is necessary for a wide implementation of degrowth. Land use change and the design of space influences social, economic and environmental processes.
Degrowth debate focuses on neighbourhood or project scale but not on urban and planning in general. There is a lack of discussion on scale issues, typically covered in urban planning.
There is an ongoing tension between centralization versus autonomy, representative and direct democracy... there are elements to be considered on each for a large scale implementation of a diverse set of degrowth visions.
Traditional and modern planning has always been based on an oriented towards demographic growth, more mobility, more buildings, economic green growth...
Where the decision happen is key to understand who and what to influence. Surprisingly, in many places the ideation and evaluation comes from the private innitiative, and there is little bottom up organization of the proposals and projects for urban development.
Urban planning has been growth driven, and the mainstream opinion that green growth can reconcile growth with better environmental outcomes. In contrast with that, there are grassroots and community driven movements that challenge how urban planning is organized, decided, invested and ultimately priotized for growth. The focus on degrowth remains though a very niche topic in the planning field.
Bring Degrowth to the urban
Degrowth in the urban aims to downscale of the economy, limiting spatial development and the resource requirements of the society in the urban settling.
This will mean at the end:
- High desinsity in the urban structure
- Integrating multiple services in the building facilities: not only private but public spaces
- Constraint high speed and airplane infraestructure
- Limit land use from external capital and large corpotations to support local economic innitiatives
- Facilitate spaces for local banks, markets...
- Avoiding suburban allocation and single family houses
- Limit car use and facilitate healthy mobility and public transport
- Use a higher proportion of land for food and renewable energy farming
Sustainability projects have normally a single focus on efficiency but not sufficiency, they should cape ultimately the aggregate use of resources. Another dimension that normally is missed in the environmental justice and fair distributions of the loads and costs of so called "development", locally and internationally.
Planning require some degree of centralization, but much more public participation and the implementation of transparency and democratic process ought to be in place. Currently assestments of planners/developers and private instances are not neutral and normally underestatimate the environmental and social cost of certain projects.
Urban planning should "escape the economy" considering social, environmental and moral values and not only growth, employment or ROI to implement a project. That means that new economic structures are necessary, that do not have a single form for urban planning private capital single focus. A change in the dominant narratives and political ideologies should also be in place. More power has to be given to localities, planners and actors that do not hold economic incentives that favor a certain project over the others.
Is eco-village/urban village the future of a degrowth society? An urban planner's perspective (Jin Xue)
In her paper, Jin critically analyzes the large scale implementation of ecovillages as a strategy to transition to degrowth. She rightfully point out that successful examples are not likely to scale due t their low density and still large dependency on global chains to thrive. She encourages the research agenda to alsofocus on the urban, the usage of existing buildings and constructions as otherwise there will be even larger land use change, energy and other resources implement a monoculture of ecovillages. It is important also to recognise that some extent of centralization still applies in a degrowth world, where public transportation as well as other services that require scale to be feasible will be planned centrally and require high density of population. The author also argue for a defense of compactness in the urban instead of further spread of populations. Multiple family dwellings and proximity to work is essential to achieve low density and land use housing. Small local settings limit the job options if large commutings are to be avoided. Local decision making and increased transparency is necessary but not sufficient to increase sustainability in urban planning. If little concerns on the footprint of the area and technical know how on the environmental impacts on the implementation of projects are lacking, localizing does not necessary lead to better outcomes. What that means at the end, is that different scales of decision making are necessary to achieve consistent, yet democratic urban planning for degrowth. Degrowth, to succeed, needs to be pursue at all scales.
Towards an urban degrowth: Habitability, finity and polycentric autonomism Federico Savini
Part I presents a critique of these three dimensions. First, it questions the regional territorialisation of contemporary economic growth and identifies functional polycentrism as the spatial paradigm that structure competition. Second, it argues that this competition is perpetuated by the maintenance of land scarcity through a planning mode that makes cities’ public goods viciously dependent on land development. Third, the paper argues that zoning is a foundational institution that maintains competition through property rights
Part II instead explores three lines of prefiguration for those same three dimensions from a degrowth
First, the paper argues for an imaginary of regions as polycentric federations of autonomous settlements. Second, it calls for a planning paradigm led by principles of finity in urban development. Third, it proposes to mobilize the notion of habitability in shaping of socio-spatial relations.
Specifically, degrowth has
failed to engage in transformation from an urban/urban regional lens rather than limiting the
scope to local initiatives on the community or neighbourhood level. The failure to recognise the
causal powers of urban/urban regional spatial patterns and planning can weaken the transformative strength of degrowth-inspired social actions and even lead to contradictions between policy
proposals and degrowth values.
the mainstream urban planning paradigm follows a political ideal
of neoliberalism, growth and competitiveness and functions as more of a hindrance than blessing
to radical societal transformation.
for planning to be a progressive
driving force of societal transformation, the mainstream planning should be transformed and
degrowth theory can provide directional reflections
Wächter (2013) addresses theoretically three potential areas for spatial planning to contribute to degrowth: as a support for renewable
energy production, facilitating a more resource-saving lifestyle and creating social capital through
more community-based facilities.
Transport planning scholars (Von Schonfeld, Ferreira, and Pinho 2018) question
the contemporary transport planning that is excessively dominated by norms of efficiency, time saving and competitiveness leading to social acceleration and economic growth
Xue (2014a) against the degrowth call for decentralisation of planning power and space-related decision-making to lower scales. Instead, she makes
a plea for multi-scalar strategies in the planning context to pursue degrowth.
A more powerful change
that can fundamentally dismantle the underpinning of current planning is the long-term stagnation
of growth which is likely to be a new condition of the future. Despite a strong political desire to resurrect the conditions of the past (unsustainable and unequitable) growth, there are internal economic logics and external ecological imperatives pointing to the impossibility and implausibility of
an ever-increasing economy (Nielsen and Næss 2011)
The question again lies in how to scale up the relevance of the local initiatives to
higher geographical scales. It can also be foreseen that new implications and challenges will arise
when justice and sustainability are put together and taken up to the urban scale.
Firstly, an overall high-density urban structure is more
efficacious in reducing total travel distances, including commuting and in promoting public transport and non-motorised travel modes (Németh 1999; Næss 2012). . The land use implications are, therefore,
about densifying existing built-up areas, prioritising the use of brownfields over undeveloped
land, abandoning the construction of suburban single-family houses and favouring the development
of apartment buildings.
Secondly, integrating a diversity of service facilities, such as grocery stores,
primary schools, kindergartens, public libraries, facilities for local sport and cultural activities and
cafes/restaurants in residential areas, promotes localised activities and reduces travel demand, compared to mono-functional neighbourhoods.
Thirdly, since intra-metropolitan travelling distances by
motorised transport are considerably influenced by the distance from the dwelling to the city centre,
one land use principle is to locate a high proportion of dwellings close to the city centre (Næss,
Tønnesen, and Wolday 2019a).
Fourthly, suburban location of certain service facilities should be avoided, such as shopping malls which generate
higher shares of car trips and longer travel distances by car
Fifthly, other land use strategies that can promote active mobility and public transport while reducing car use include urban
development near public transport nodes, reducing parking lots, providing infrastructures for
biking and walking, reducing road capacity and eventually converting them to other uses (Cairns,
Atkins, and Goodwin 2002).
Sixthly, planning can allocate land to produce renewables at different
geographical scales (Wächter 2013).
Some arguments speaking against compact cities draw on studies which show that the total
household footprint tends to increase when people move from suburban or rural areas to urban
areas (e.g. Ottelin, Heinonen, and Junnila 2015). However, the increased
footprint is mainly a consequence of increased affluence and consumption level and cosmopolitan
lifestyles, rather than the spatial urban structure.
To reduce total environmental impacts, a compressive growth in the form of compact city is insufficient (Næss, Saglie, and Richardson 2019c; Czepkiewicz et al. 2020).
How to prevent an enlarged gap between the
wealthy and the poor and safeguard basic needs of all population groups within a non-growth condition implies redistribution from those who have excess to those who have less. For housing development it could mean a number of innovative planning policies that are distinctive from the existing
ones. These may include setting minimum standard to secure everyone’s basic need for housing,
establishing maximum standard to prevent the rich from possessing even more space, and remoulding
and sharing existing spacious dwellings (Næss, Saglie, and Richardson 2019c; Mete and Xue 2020)
Degrowing planning intends to transform the mainstream planning into an engine of
social transformation towards the degrowth future, a transformative perspective distinct from the
existing transformative planning traditions that tend to contrast transformative planning practices
with the institutionalised planning (Friedmann 2003).
In my conceptualisation, degrowth planning counters the hegemony of economic growth and facilitates a downscaling
of urban physical development that enhances ecological conditions, satisfies basic needs and
secures justice at the local and global level, in the short and long term. Degrowing planning can
take place on three fronts: ideology, normativity and utopianism
Harvey’s claim back in 1985 who contended that the
planner, without awareness, is committed to the ideology of harmony within the capitalist social
order and contributes to the process of capitalist social reproduction through producing, maintaining
and managing the built environment (Harvey 1985). The ideological commitment to economic growth
is argued to be one of the fundamental barriers to sustainable urban development (Xue 2018)
Likewise, the principle of willingness-to pay as an indicator of people’s need in cost–benefit analysis gives more influence on decision
making to the affluent than the poor, which underestimates the needs of the people who have
low ability to pay.
Secondly, planning is a profession that cannot evade the inquiry of substantive values. This is due
to the fact that planners’ choices of solutions do generate outcomes in terms of the allocation
and distribution of access to resources by different population groups and have consequences on
non-human environment. Moreover, the very nature and purpose of planning – intervention and
delivering a better future than would otherwise be the case – requires value inquiry of what is
‘good’ or ‘better’. Planning is, therefore, in the position to suggest a normative envisioning of
what is a better future
Degrowth values that respect environmental limits, satisfy human needs and ensure social justice
can be a springboard for the planning profession to reawaken an inquiry of substantive values.
‘Respecting environmental limits’ is a normative value stemming from the fact that we live on a
limited planet with finite natural resources and ecological boundaries. Applying to urban development and planning, it means lowering absolute, not just relative, environmental impacts caused by
urban development, including greenhouse gas emissions, resource depletion, environmental pollution, biodiversity loss, ecosystem degradation, etc
Planners in public sectors, promoting a degrowth urban vision, may raise some tricky ethical
issues related to democracy. If the majority of the population support the existing growth policies,
consumerism and the capitalist system in general and have elected politicians representing these
values, is it then ethically unproblematic for planners to impose their own degrowth values when
planning interventions?
An Urban Degrowth Scenario - Barcelona
Barcelona is for many reasons a potential real life lab for degrowth. It has the size, the political support and the challenges that make it ideal to consider a different type of urban planning towards post growth.
There are three challenges worth mentioning and where degrowth policies can help:
- Rapid increase house prices, both for buying and rent
- Very large suburb area (three times the population of Barcelona) moving back and forth to the city for economic reasons
- Poor functioning of public transport, large use of car to the city and in the city, which lead to congestion and unnaceptable levels of pollution
- Increasing volumn of tourists, heavily concentrated in some areas, eroding the local ways of living and making harder for locals to remain in the neighboruhood when their livelihoods do not depend on tourism
Here is what we can do, partially implemented by the current goverment in the city:
- Limit prices increases on house dwellings, particularly on renting schemes
- Facilitate more remote working and generate more centers of economic activity, providing incentives for businesses (global and local) to settle in other locations with dense populations
- Invest in public transport and make it more affordable for regular users, provide parking islands next to stations outside the city
- Stablish quotas per neighbourhood on turistic appartments and also touristic focused activities to avoid a monoculture in the economic life and also the erosion of the actual livelihood in the nerighbourhood
Implementing those is not easy, economic lobbies push heavily and the media has been very aggressive against limits in car mobility, touristic appartments... providing only investment and growth numbers to validate the policies of the current major Ada Colau.
More resources and power is required by the city administrations to ensure a sufficiently reliable and affordable network of public transport is in place, together with housing that is for the local people mainly, while giving limited space for visitors and turists. A coordination instead of a competitions across cities in this region is essential to create a more multicentered urban plan, while they remain easily connected by train and other means.
The question remains wheter local citizens will value more affordable housing, cleaner air, less noisy cities, or they will succumb to a media communicating the fear of economic collapse due to less international investment going to their cities.
As the 2008 crisis and Covid has shown, the single focus on tourism and housing as economic and urban planning drivers leads to a fragile city that will be condemened to losse their charm and their own citizens, that have been violently expulsed from their neigbhbourhoods or are condemned to breath air that is not only unhealthy, but a threat to the mental development of their kids.
There is an urgent need for urban planning for degrowth, and a lot has to be done in both academia and by practitioners to scale a fair downscaling of the social metabolism of the North.
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