Abstract
Introduction
Degrowth has been defined as ‘a collective and deliberative process aimed at the equitable downscaling of the overall capacity to produce and consume and of the role of markets and commercial exchanges as a central organizing principle of human lives’ (Sekulova et al., 2013: 1). A systemic imaginary of transition, degrowth is a ‘source of hope and dreams’ (Latouche, 2009: 32) for a more equitable and sustainable society that has ‘exited the economy’ (Latouche, 2012). A degrowth perspective couples the critique of contemporary market economies with the prefiguration of a society emancipated from the imperative of competition.
A degrowth imaginary begins from evidence indicating the impossibility of decoupling economic growth from environmental destruction (Hickel and Kallis, 2019) and of (self)destructive capacities of capitalist economies. Degrowers criticize the ideology of competition that pervades society, forcing companies, states, and humans into an unending pursuit of increased productivity and the exploitation of material resources, land, and labour. Against the hegemony of growth in (eco)modernist thinking, degrowers call for a de-commodification of nature, labour, land, and housing and for an ethic of solidarity, cooperation, and wellbeing. Among numerous proposals (for an overview, see D’Alisa et al., 2015), they envision an economy built around notions of care and reciprocity; the divestment from (and taxation of) financial, rent, and fossil-based activities; de-commodified housing and the revaluation of domestic work; and expanded free-time through a basic universal income (Jackson, 2009; Kallis et al., 2012). Against consumerism, they urge a cultural shift toward values of
To contribute to this project, this paper explores an urban degrowth paradigm in planning. First, it develops a critique of the contemporary planning mechanisms that drive the growth of city-regions and, second, it sketches new lines of imagination for those mechanisms from a degrowth perspective. Contemporary urban economists celebrate cities’ unique capacity to concentrate and produce economic wealth. As post-Fordist ‘growth machines’ (Molotch, 1976), cities are defined as economic ‘triumphs’ (Glaeser, 2011). Urban development is less a product than a driver of economic growth. Cities, then, are prime sites for experimentation among degrowth activists. They are the locations of most ‘positive fragments of degrowth urbanism’ (Alexander and Gleeson, 2018: 180), that is, sites of transformative practices of cohousing, slow mobility, farmer’s markets, self-sufficient housing, non-commercial sharing, and urban gardening, which, since the 1990s, have offered viable alternatives to competitive growth. These are the seeds of an urban life premised on degrowth. Yet, while spatial planning plays a crucial role in imagining, promoting, or hindering a degrowth urban development, there is hardly any work that explicitly identifies the essential logics of a degrowth planning paradigm.
Mobilizing the prefigurative power of degrowth, this paper presents a critique and a framework for planning from a degrowth perspective. As I argue below, current degrowth research addressing urban areas primarily focuses on the real-life of de-commodified practices of eco-living, the challenges of realizing a symbiosis between the urban and the rural, and the imperative of democratic autonomy in cities. However, this body of work still misses alternatives to the planning mechanisms and approaches that bind urban development to economic growth.
To tackle this challenge, the article focuses on three dimensions of contemporary planning: the territorial organization of city-regions, the paradigm of urban development that drives urban transformations and the approach to land use organization. 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 perspective. 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
Both critique and prefiguration points at the fundamental traits of contemporary planning within market economies. My critique builds on the available study of planning frameworks in large urban agglomerations, the centers of economic growth globally. As degrowth literature itself, much of this literature is still produced in the Aglo-European contexts of industrialized cities. Yet, while the specific articulation of these planning mechanisms may change in context, the paper deliberately keeps an abstract level of argumentation, which is necessary to question the fundamental tenets of urban development in contemporary capitalism. I will nonetheless support my propositions with examples from different cities of the world.
The current challenges for an imaginary of urban degrowth
Urban areas are central to the degrowth imaginary. The urban activism of the 70 s and 80 s showed great affinities with the contemporary body of degrowth principles. The term ‘degrowth’ was not yet used by these activists but both their targets and their proposals did resonate with the essential principles of a degrowth urban imaginary (Demaria et al., 2013). They were resisting to the expansion of airports, highways, industrial food production and aggressive real-estate development. Their actions included a range of strategies, tactics and policies ranging from cycling advocacy, materials reuse, squatting, slow food, street markets, consumer cooperatives and self-managed green spaces. Cities were both the fields of struggle and the stage of prefiguration for early degrowth activism. The scholarship that later captured the degrowth imaginary of those movements widely recognized the role of cities in re-appropriating individuals’ time and in devising new forms of living based on principles of solidarity and wellbeing (Gorz, 1991: 21). The cities of degrowth, as Latouche suggested in developing a philosophy of a degrowth imaginary, reflects the village atmosphere of southern European towns and celebrate the
Despite the centrality of cities for the degrowth imaginary, only a very small minority of studies have explicitly questioned the growth-dependency of planning and engaged with the idea of a degrowth approach to planning. Among those, Rydin (2013) pointed at the micro-economic mechanisms that bind planning to the pursuit of economic gains. She questions the dependency of public authorities on public-gains out of private land development. Looking at shrinking cities, Hackworth (2018) stressed the need to emancipate planning from the pursuit of population growth to enlarge cities’ tax base. He urges planners to pursue wealth within stability in size. Ferreira and von Schönfeld (2020) urges planners to form an alliance with the degrowth economics. In so doing, they argue, it is possible to envisage a planning approach that is oriented to well-being rather than redistribution of economic gains.
Degrowth scholars, however, have for long looked at urban areas as sites of prefiguration for a degrowth society. Today’s research on degrowth in cities form a constellation of studies that, while sharing a common concern for urbanized areas and their socio-spatial geographies (see for an overview Demaria et al., 2019), do not yet question the planning mechanisms that drive urban development. These studies can be summarized in three macro lines of debate.
This overview shows that de-commodified eco-living, symbiotic urbanization and political autonomy within regional territories provide the step-stones for urban degrowth research (and action). They are not monolithic proposals but suggest that cities are breeding grounds for experimental and alternative practices of living that produce new socio-spatial ecologies of place and that this process requires radical forms of direct urban democracy. However, this body of work still misses a critique of the institutions, regulations and governing approaches that anchor city-regional development to perpetual economic growth. They do not explain how real-life degrowth practices challenge existing urban institutions nor how they generate new ways to govern land use at different scales. Furthermore, they do not explore the role that planning plays in setting the conditions for these practices to survive against the constant pressure of co-optation and marginalization by competitive land markets.
Current degrowth research does however suggest that a degrowth of cities will affect the regional territorialisation of urban areas, the way different land uses are combined and the economic drivers of urban development. This paper builds on these inputs to rethink the fundamental institutions that structure the city-regions as competitive markets, that have artificially separated land uses and that have frustrated communities’ political and material autonomy. To do so, it addresses three key planning mechanisms that shape urban areas under contemporary capitalism: the territorial organization of city-regions, the development paradigm that drives urban change and the approach adopted to organize land uses.
In what follows I will depart from these insights to structure both a critique and a proposal to rethink planning from a degrowth perspective.
Part I: Critique
To set an imaginary of an urban degrowth is necessary to dissect the mechanisms of spatial organization that strengthen and reproduce economic growth. There are three particular planning mechanisms that are functional to the maintenance of economic competition in contemporary urban development. These are the functional polycentrism that organize city regions as competitive land markets, the maintenance of land scarcity to lubricate this competition and the institution of Euclidean land zoning to regulate and protect private property.
The regional territorialisation of competition: Functional polycentrism
Today, global economic growth is territorialized into what Scott defines as a ‘post-metropolitan worldwide grid’ (Scott, 2019: 2009), an archipelago of urbanized centres that through their competition for mobile capital drive contemporary economic growth. In 2014, 300 metropolitan areas produced 47% of global GDP, despite hosting just 20% of the world’s population (Brookings Institution, 2015). These regions’ GDP is also affected less by economic crises and stably drives national economies (McKinsey Global Institute City Scope 1.0). This regional system is far from becoming sustainable, despite numerous attempts at decoupling urban development from environmental degradation (see for example Xue, 2015). The ecological footprint of contemporary city dwellers exceeds any sustainable threshold and capital agglomerations have the highest ecological footprint. 1
From a global perspective, city regions are in competition with each other, but these regions do not compete as unitary agents in the global economy. They work as ‘space of competitiveness’ (Brenner, 2004), becoming territories where the intra-regional competition between cities and neighbourhoods bolster urban development. In these territories of competition, urban centres jostle for incoming investments in housing, commercial spaces, entertainment facilities, and public facilities. Urban areas compete to
Since the 1990s, regionalism – the organization of economies into regions – became a dominant approach to managing and maintaining intra-regional competition. Strategic regional planning is, on the one hand, geared to balance growth against wealth polarization and environmental damage and, on the other, to boost the global capacity of the region to attract capital on the other (Grant, 2017). To do so, planners have advanced a model of spatial organization that can be defined as ‘functionally polycentric’ because it views regions as the territory where different urban centres manage their competition by means of specializing into particular functional qualities for the regional economy.
Functional polycentrism relies on an
Without a strong redistributive state, this process inevitably produces polarization, dividing areas that produce and reproduce capital, labour, and material. To boost growth, cities come to depend on expansion in the wider region’s economic output and on permanent differentiation and specialization. This process entails a divisive approach to territorial specialization. ‘Business districts,’ ‘industrial parks,’ ‘new towns,’ ‘rust-belts,’ ‘corridors,’ ‘buffer zones,’ and ‘green-belts’ are just some of the many forms of territorial organization that, while managing externalities, reproduce divisive regional competition. The popularity of transit-oriented development and corridors, while presented as improving accessibility and inclusion, only enhances labour productivity, increases sales, and promotes industrial investments in selected areas (Kasraian et al., 2016). Similarly, most recent strategies of ‘sustainable growth,’ ‘green growth,’ or ‘circular growth’ hardly question the regional distribution of functions, reproducing an “ecosystem services” approach that quantifies and commodifies natural qualities (Borowy and Schmelzer, 2017).
Functional polycentrism has historically offered an effective way to maintain liveability despite unevenness economic development. However, this form of territorial organization reproduces a structural interdependency among subareas (for labour, materials, food, and transport) upon which regional competitiveness is organized. Cooperation is linked to an ever-increasing regional output or national subsidies, with regions fragmenting during economic recessions. Coordinating mechanisms remain unstable and prone to crises, having been heavily impacted by the 2008 global financial crises (Hadjimichalis and Hudson, 2014).
The maintenance of urban competition through scarcity
Why do cities compete after all? The persistence of inter-city competition is due to the fact not only that, today, urban real estate is the most important asset for households, but also that development is a carrier of investments in transports, utilities, and many other public goods. Cites can control revenue streams such as development fees, utility fees, real estate, and land taxation, although this is not their prime source of income. Cities depend on these streams to subsidize public goods, especially in times of austerity (Peck, 2012). 2 Goods funded through these streams, whether directly or indirectly, include pavements, designed public spaces, urban nature, water systems, care services, and subsidies for social and affordable housing. Still, these resources, however necessary for urban liveability, depend on an overall increase in economic output.
I here argue that there are three mechanisms that strengthen this dependency: the maximization of
At the base of this process lies an approach to urban development that is rooted in neo-classical economics. Urban change, as Rydin explains, is driven by the ‘gap between the price of a site in its existent use and the potential price if developed for another use’ (2013: 36). Planning regulates these differentials in price by structuring land markets. This process is essential to developers themselves (and the development industry at large) but also to public planning authorities. By enabling larger price differentials, planners stimulate development and at the same time set the conditions to gain public returns out of this development. The growth-dependency of planning is strengthened by the fact that the highest the market return on the development, the higher the public gain obtained.
Central to these calculations is the mechanism of “value capturing,” which allows the capture and use of a portion of the yields realized through development for public purposes. Value capturing realizes the public share in development, despite private subjects holding development rights. Value capturing has become a central mechanism of contemporary urban entrepreneurialism and it takes different forms depending on the property regime at hand (Phelps and Miao, 2019). When city governments own land, they can impose public service fees and obligations on developers. When they do not, they try to set regulatory schemes that capture value indirectly, by taxing rent increases, or by seeking to increase the income level of their jurisdictions (Gielen et al., 2017). This mechanism becomes highly problematic when municipal governments have little public spending capacities (or land property) – often peripheral or shrinking towns in growing agglomerations – because it accelerates the search for increasing value (Savini, 2014). Combined with national austerity policies, value capturing has helped financialize land and housing markets and prompted city governments to adopt the same accountancy models as private corporations (Weber, 2010). Common examples of these processes include rising property taxes as part of gentrification or the promotion of development to fund ecosystem services. The more that cities rely on capturing land value increases, the more common goods – public space, care services, energy, and mobility – are reduced to an appendix of development processes.
The regulation of land scarcity explains why value capturing has become taken-for-granted in urban governance. An axiom in neoclassic economics, scarcity has been portrayed as the necessary condition of pricing goods positively and the ethical justification of private property (Bognar, 2018). Beyond pregiven conditions of land, water, and energy scarcity, the active creation of relative scarcity through planning has justified the neoliberal defence of property rights and competitive land markets (Gerber et al., 2018). In a competitive land market, abundance causes price to fall. In cities, competition for scarce land prevents stagnation and boosts real investments in land.
Scarcity’s role in maintaining the land market is revealed during economic crises because it allows to concentrate investments in areas where high returns can be achieved. After economic downturns, cities have widely reformed their planning frameworks to maintain pressure on available plots of land (Ponzini, 2016). They further strengthened the interdependence of market development and social and environmental benefits. After 2008, the ideology of ‘doing more with less,’ has legitimized austerity agendas presented as necessary given scarce land, fiscal, and other resources (Nikolaeva, 2019). Yet in cities it justified risky public investments in infrastructural markets, aimed at fuelling private initiatives. Here, the reaction to crisis is not deregulation, but rather a more precise regulation of land markets to re-establish scarcity, especially in countries with long planning traditions (Savini, 2017).
The interdependence of public investment and cycles of land value increase makes contemporary urban growth models unstable and unfair. The higher the actual rent gap in a particular area, the more likely it is that development will concentrate there, shifting investment away from the poorer urban areas, which are often most in need of public amenities. This system reproduces a competitive regional market that must be permanently managed – or restored – through public investment programs, which in turn need to be repaid by value capturing (Kirkpatrick and Smith, 2011). This also increases public risks because, to maximize land values, both governments and private parties tend to privilege large-scale projects, which, when they fail, have dramatic effects on municipal revenues. Finally, this system is unstable because it depends on expected increases in real estate values: both private profits and public gains suffer in times of economic downturn, frustrating development and further endangering the public goods that depend on it.
The organization of competitive urban markets: Euclidean zoning and property rights
Land zoning provides the conditions under which scarcity and productivity are spatialized. Zoning spatially regulates land use, subdividing land into fragments with particular use requirements. As regulatory tool, it allows local governments to establish a variety of conditions under which land can (or cannot) be developed. These relate to population and building densities, maximum volumes, and relative distances between uses, or even to specific commercial activities, opening times, etc.
Modern planning is rooted on an approach of zoning generally known as “Euclidean” to stress its essentializing, rationalist, categorical, and geometrical character. This form of zoning is today essential to planning because it enables a subdivision of land into discrete units and allows prescribing desirable combinations of land uses. Because of this capacity, Euclidean zoning had an important role in structuring land markets. It institutes zones of exchangeable land to which property rights are assigned, whether private or public. Moreover, the definition of zones is culturally embedded in institutionalized notions of “good” land use that can shift over time.
Since the mid-1970s, planners and urban activists have contested Euclidean zoning’s standardizing effects on communities’ ability to govern themselves and innovate living practices (Friedmann, 1994). Today, this form of zoning is still object of critique because it can constraint communities’ capacities for regulating and organizing autonomously. While planners recognize its importance to protect the spatial and ecological qualities of place, they question existing zoning frameworks because they tend to degrade the plurality of rationalities in land use, frustrating more cooperative, collective, and informal cohabitation processes (Davy, 2014).
The parcelling of land into discreet units, each endowed with property and use rights, stabilizes market expectations and calculations regarding land property transactions. As a future-oriented tool, zoning stabilizes property values, establishing a degree of certainty regarding future land values. It is historically rooted in both the urgency to organize hygiene or safety in the modern city and the need to devise an ‘insurance policy that the single-family homeowner’s investment would be protected in stable neighbourhood community’ (Boyer, 1986: 148). The legal certainty provided by continuity in land use provided an essential factor to calibrate property investments and stimulate housing investments, but also divided cities into ‘club-like communities’ of proprietors (Webster, 2002). Land’s commodification as a fungible good depends upon its possible future uses, not its actual realized use. Economic growth – increasing land and real estate transactions – needs a legal infrastructure of zoning to regulate the future of land, especially when the liquidity of financialized assets puts these futures at risk.
Property based and functionalist zoning not only maintains but enlarges land markets. City governments increasingly use zoning in development as a prescriptive rather than prospective tool. In premodern urban history,
Zoning’s significance for growth is epitomized by its prominence in times of crisis. When real estate markets slow down, adherents to neoliberalism portray zoning as housing markets’ enemy, a depressor of housing supply, on the grounds that it organizes land scarcity. Advocates of housing justice also target zoning, for it often reproduces property rights, and racial and income discrimination, in housing markets. Significantly for this paper, activist practices of social innovation and urban commoning also criticize zoning regulations. This highlights the importance to explicitly interrogate this instrument in a degrowth approach to planning. The challenge is not to abolish zoning all together but to imagine and realize a new approach to land use regulation able to transition towards a self-sufficient urban society and protect land from commodification or dispossession. The ambition is to reimagine normative conceptions of “good land use,” beyond property value.
Part II: Prefiguration
As showed at the beginning of this paper, degrowth scholarship and activism offer many examples of what urban living would look like when freed from competition and accumulation. These examples share a commitment to values of solidarity, cooperation, and synergy between the city and nature, and to self-regulated commons’ capacity to empower communities. In what follows, I set out three propositions for an urban degrowth (Table 1). Together, in imagining urban settlements in a degrowth society, they rethink the three mechanisms of urban development outlined above. Against prevailing mechanisms of contemporary urban growth, I propose three lines of prefiguration: a polycentric autonomism in organizing regional territories, the institution of a finity paradigm in urban transformations, and the principle of habitability as driver of socio-spatial organization. Habitability moves beyond the ideology of zoned (individual) property towards an imaginary of (collective) balance and equilibrium.
Polycentric autonomism
Autonomy is central to the imaginary of degrowth. It is a “normative” condition ascribed to territories, defined as the capacity for, and right to, self-determination. Degrowth scholars have widely argued that autonomy should be construed not in solely political or jurisdictional terms, but also as a cultural emancipation from the ideology of market competition (for a review, see Asara et al., 2013).
From a territorial and socio-spatial perspective, I understand autonomy as a community’s capacity to independently provide biophysical, material, and social resources for its survival and prosperity. It entails emancipation from dependence on other territories of production, consumption, and material exploitation. Hence, material sufficiency and political autonomy overlap within a territory. They coexist in the self-governing of services essential for socio-ecological reproduction (namely water, energy, and waste), productive activities, and the resources necessary for production.
Autonomy is not isolationism, but the condition and product of processes of coordination, assistance, solidarity, and redistribution across localities (Lluch, 2012). Although existing regionalisms already involve a combination of coordination and autonomy, they subordinate biophysical and ecological elements to economic goals. Enhancing the autonomy of urban centres within regions entails moving away from policies premised on functional dependencies among specialized centres, and moving toward a region of centres whose social and material autonomy relies on regional coordination.
This demands a
An early imaginary of decentralized eco-agglomerations is Friedman’s
In imagining regional autonomism – and type of planning to pursue it –we can build on existing examples of regional federations of autonomous producers of different services. Campi Aperti is an association of regionally federated farming cooperatives that care for each other and protect local agriculture in Bologna. 3 Similarly, Chantier de l’economie Social is a network of associations that have provided mutual child and home care in Quebec since the mid-2000s. 4 In the housing sector, the Mietshäuser Syndikat in Germany is one of the most known examples of federated housing commons at national level, where ownership of alienation rights of housing cooperatives is partially networked. In the energy sector, there are many examples of community owned distributed energy systems attempting to establish overarching federations (or platforms).
As Hall et al. (2019) argued, today’s technological advancements combined with a re-municipalization of energy and utility infrastructures can set the conditions to connect decentred systems with each other both within and across municipal territories. Nationwide examples are the E’Nostra cooperative in Italy or the Vandebron platform in the Netherlands (not a cooperative), which connect wider networks of producers and consumers. 5 Upper Austria Water is a regional association of autonomous rural water cooperatives, which together organize control systems and emergency recovery. 6
These are a few examples of federations of producers and consumers of essential services, working as regional networks of coordinated autonomous units (for more examples of regional commons see Krueger et al., 2017). This understanding of the region has deep implications for planning. It understand planning as an active practice of rebalancing existing hierarchies in urban systems, putting the self-sufficient survival of localities at the forefront, and protecting their autonomy. The regional space is not anymore the driver of an economic growth that in turn trickles down to localities, but is a mode of coordination between localities that allow maintaining and preserving autonomy.
Finity
Degrowth engages with a post-scarcity paradigm in economic theory, which moves beyond the assumption that a fair distribution of resources is best achieved through social relations of competition and property. Degrowth thinkers advance the notion of
In urban contexts, the idea of sufficiency translates into settlements able to organize and maintain social ties and food and energy provisions autonomously, without property markets and the need to expand and develop. Such sufficiency requires deliberately a reduction of demands. The dominance of a scarcity paradigm in planning is functional to simultaneously regulate and enable the competition for land to be developed, lubricating land markets by maintaining exchange values steadily attractive. To interrupt this process, this paradigm must be displaced by one of
Urban activism has generally mobilized claims of finity in urban development in combination with an imaginary of well-being in cities, targeting urban renewal and densification programs in 70 s and 80 s or the expansion of airports and highways. Yet, in the face of an ecological crisis and the erosion of well-being (and affordability) in urban areas, the plea to finity is back into the agenda, with cities undertaking strategies to control overexploitation of natural and human resources and redistribute excess. Examples include establishing common car free zones, maximum CO2 emissions per district, maximum rent levels, maximum nights for short-term rentals, and a minimum number of years before properties can be sold. Clear requirements for public provision, which existed prior to neoliberal reforms, are another existing example of regulators imposing obligations on developers. Maximum standards apply to many other dimensions of urban land. Limits have been set to tourist entrances (i.e. Dubrovnik and Maya Bay) and dwellings above a certain rental price, not to mention population caps, which may de-concentrate and re-urbanize outer urban centers. 7 Absolute standards should work as performative rules, limiting practices that endanger a particular locality’s habitability (see below). They should set mandatory limits to land use, thereby reducing biodiversity loss, emissions, waste, and infringements on green space.
For an example of these redistributive and regenerative effects, consider how the right to housing enforced by squatters impacted on Amsterdam’s economy in the early 1980s. Political reclaiming vacant properties restored urban qualities in a shrinking city. Today, a logic of finity is justifying Berlin’s successful ‘Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co’ campaign, which challenges the concentration of home ownership in the hands of large corporations. 8 These policies justify stringent taxation on vacancy and speculation, and transferring properties to owners’ associations and cooperatives. It will redirect resources toward the socio-ecological improvement of available land and natural resources in cities.
Adopting a principle of finity in regulating urban land should not be misunderstood as urban shrinkage, just as degrowth should not misunderstood as regression. Rather, it is a controlled process of revaluing every precious square meter in a crowded planet as a precious social good.
Habitability
Degrowth is founded on the evidence that the pursuit of economic growth is socially and environmentally destructive in that it entails exploiting ecosystems and human labour. Against this, degrowers propose alternative values that can shape social relations, liberated from the imaginary of competition and accumulation. These values include care, solidarity, reciprocity, and disconnecting wellbeing from GDP and other quantitative notions.
The challenge for an urban degrowth planning is to ingrain these values in institutions of land use organization that generate well-being, justice and ecological stability while being emancipated from the dominance of individual property rights. As explained above, land markets are today organized through a zoning approach that is rationalist, functionalist and individualized. This system is functional to the maintenance of competition because it geometrically separates land into exchangeable units with unitary, standardized and comparable functions. A degrowth approach to land use organization needs therefore to offer a different approach that is able, on the one hand, to appreciate the overlapping multiplicity of land uses within a parcel of land and, on the other, to move beyond individualized forms of property allocation. This is an approach that does not reject all together the need to regulate space into zones but that defines these zones beyond individual property and standardized functions. These zones can instead identify the unique relations that form the ecosystem of a particular area, and to allow for a collective management of land. Rather than a categorizing tool, zoning should provide a compass able to inform interventions to restore, balance and maintain urban places.
To reimage a century-old land property system is the utmost task of degrowth planning research. In engaging with this task, I suggest mobilizing the notion of habitability as fulcrum for an alternative approach to land use organization. The word is rooted in the Latin Habitare, meaning to live or dwell, and in the proto-Indo-European locution
To take habitability – the right to a habitat – as a central principle of socio-spatial organization means moving from an individualist to a systemic approach to land use rights. In contrast with Euclidean zoning, the subject of rights is not the legal ‘subject’ that owns a particular plot of land but it is the ‘relation’ between the subjects and that land. This step is crucial to move beyond a paradigm of dichotomous regulation (public or private subject and object) to a relational regulation, which is essential to institute practices of commoning (Mattei and Quarta, 2018). While this may be hard to imagine from the perspective of legal positivism that today govern judicial systems (particularly in the Global North), there are existing examples that already translated a relational regulation in practice. The
These examples from indigenous modes of land management sketch useful lines of imagination for the planning of highly urbanized areas. 9 They suggest that the social-ecology of an area – from a street or neighbourhood to a municipality – and not the specific functions of a parcel – become central to the planning process. The target of a zoning approach becomes to identify, maintain and restore the social and ecological qualities of this area, which result from the contextually specific way in which different uses interact with each other (i.e. residential, commercial, waste disposal, water provision, natural and recreational areas. The balance of these qualities become the subject of rights allocated through land-use. This include the capacity of an area to cater for essential demands such as heathy food and healthy lifestyle; to provide with essential care services; to provide social dwellings and maintain a degree of social diversity in place; to allow for slow mobility, immobility, clean water, healthy soil and waste reuse to name a few. The balance of these qualities is not standard but specific to the context.
This approach to land-use is essential to both the application of finity rules and the achievement of polycentric and autonomous cooperation between localities. Finity rules can be used to maintain habitability qualities of place, preventing those land uses that can be armful for the social ecological qualities of place. They make it possible to enforce the precautionary principle in governing land use transformations and prevent the erosion of the place’s habitability. They also allow identifying excesses to trigger planning programs oriented to rebalance and restore. A polycentric network of autonomous localities requires the acknowledgement of the specific habitability of each locality. It also helps identifying the essential qualities that cannot be autonomously catered by specific communities and need to be organized by federations.
In sum, habitability offers a context specific approach to land-use organization for which the know-how and direct involvement of local communities becomes crucial. For planners, it is already possible to build on existing models of land ownership that have coupled collective management of land with essential habitability concerns (e.g. affordable housing), namely community land trusts and cooperative forms of community-based ownership.
Conclusions
Cities are central to the imaginary of degrowth. Urban degrowth research has largely demonstrated the capacity of real-life practices of urban dwelling to plant the seeds of a more cooperative, symbiotic and democratic urban society. Yet, this constellation of works has not yet provided with a systemic critique of the urban institutions governing contemporary urban growth nor a prefiguration of alternative institutions for socio-spatial organization. This paper sharpened the understanding of urban degrowth by dissecting the challenges and lines of imagination for an urban degrowth paradigm in planning. It did so by looking at three planning mechanisms that bind urban development to economic growth and that perpetuate this co-dependency: the territorial organization of regions, the development paradigm and the approach to land-use organization used in planning.
Part I argued that, territorially, economic growth organizes according to principles of functional polycentrism that perpetually promote internal competition among urban areas within agglomerations. Regions are divided and uneven ecosystems driven by cities’ and corporations’ search for increasing land values to capture as public returns. Scarcity became the necessary condition to perpetuate a paradigm of urban growth dependent on the imperative of capturing value through land development. The individualist paradigm of zoned property rights became the paradigm of efficient spatial organization that has maintained urban competition through modern urban history.
Part II built on this critique to sketch the prospects of degrowth planning research. In contrast with a functional understanding of region, it is crucial to reimagine regional systems as polycentric patterns of autonomous urban settlements. Necessarily, this autonomy is both political and material and confederative cooperation needs to ensure territorial solidarity. This conception of the region cannot work without regulations that deliberately decelerate – if not annul – competition in economic output among urban areas. To move beyond land scarcity, I propose to search for a planning paradigm built around the notion of finity, to build a regulatory framework that strive towards the setting of absolute standards. This shift in paradigm is crucial to maintain and restore existing qualities of place and to decelerate competition for land. The notion of
This paper did not address explicitly the underlying political change (and struggles) necessary to produce and foster degrowth urban imaginaries. Still today, the profile of a degrowth politics remains an open debate. Yet, degrowth scholarship explicitly recognize the power of prefiguration, on the capacity of existing degrowth practices to coalesce into political movements of change. In this paper, I suggest that confederational institutions are necessary to resist against the pressure of capital on land, and that finity needs to be the principle that govern those federated autonomous communities to sustain their independence. The idea of habitability is yet a crucial compass to inform redistributive processes across those localities, to ensure essential social and ecological qualities. These proposals may be familiar to many urban scholars, planners, activists, and professionals who have long advocated environmental and social justice. Given limited space, this paper could not hope to summarize in detail the immense body of work criticizing capitalist growth in its social and spatial modes. Rather, it has meant to prefigure an urban engaged scholarship able to rethink cities as dynamic sites of deceleration, regeneration, and redistribution.
Summary overview of the critiques and prefiguration presented in the paper.
