🌃 What is the relationship between cities and economic growth ? During the last 50 years cities were both the driver of and driven by neoliberal economy. Building malls, tunnels, parkings, flashy condominiums and other expensive landmarks have created a new type of urbanism which embeds financial flows in the built environment. Today, it is hard to imagine a city that does not grow both spatially and financially. This spatial specialization of cities is now stripping them from space to satisfy its own needs in terms of food, manufacturing and energy production. It is also stripping cities from the necessary labour to carry out its ecological redirection and reparation. As such, this episode will try to question how to break this reinforcing loop between cities and economic growth.
🎓 To help us explore what would post-growth cities could look like and how to implement them, I had the pleasure to discuss with Federico Savini. Federico is an Associate Professor in Environmental Planning, Institutions and Politics at the University of Amsterdam. He combines approaches of political sociology, urban planning and critical geography to study the pathways towards a form of urbanization that thrives within planetary boundaries. He has and will explore the degrowth perspective on spatial planning in his European Research Council Starting Grant project and is the co-editor of the book Post-Growth Planning - Cities Beyond the Market Economy.
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🌃 Planning for Post-Growth Cities