Post-Growth Planning

This cluster explores the question of growth in response to a growing interest in what this means for issues central to planning such as the provision of transport, infrastructure and housing.

1 April 2024

Overview

There is an empirical core that unites historic work on the ‘limits to growth’, recent inheritors to the ecological economics this spawned, the activism and critical analysis of capitalism known as post or degrowth. This is the evidence that the permanent and sufficient, absolute decoupling of economic growth from carbon emissions and resource consumption required to avert multiple ecological crises is illusory. From this flows the realisation that economic growth, at least as it is currently conceived in public policy, is in itself a problem. Not only does the pursuit of growth exacerbate ecological breakdown but even in its own terms it fails. Beyond a certain level increasing economic growth appears to have little or even a negative impact on wellbeing. To date the majority of scholarship critical of growth has taken place either at a high level of abstraction, for example modelling the material stocks and flows in the economy or at the local level through the reification of small scale solutions for example co-operatives and urban agriculture. Whilst neither is inherently problematic for planning scholars it creates something of a void around the city, regional and national level of policy making.

The question of the relationship between planning and economic growth is something a handful of planning academics are beginning to address. Academics at the Bartlett School of Planning have been exploring the question of growth for some time and there is growing interest in what this means for issues central to planning such as the provision of transport, infrastructure and housing. We believe planning has much to contribute to the discussion of what a world beyond growth might look like. The knowledge acquired from a long history of planning theory and research is valuable in both operationalising but also pointing out the implications of any planned reduction in economic activity. Planning has historically played a role in regulating the encroachment on the natural world and promoting wellbeing but how does it function without the motor of economic growth to drive it? How are central concerns such as housing need or poor access to the services necessary for people to live well to be addressed when the resources to construct housing or infrastructure and the land available are increasingly limited?

People

Dr Dan Durrant, The Bartlett School of Planning
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Outputs

Integrating principles of post-growth into teaching on several BSP postgraduate and undergraduate modules
Beyond Growth Workshop July 2023
Two tracks at the European Society for Ecological Economics Degrowth Conference June 2024
Daniel Durrant, Christian Lamker & Yvonne Rydin (2023) The Potential of Post-Growth Planning: Re-Tooling the Planning Profession for Moving beyond Growth, Planning Theory & Practice, 24:2, 287-295, DOI: 10.1080/14649357.2023.2198876

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Photo by Kevin Bergen on Unsplash