Julia Spanier presents at 4th Rural Conference in Montpellier

Julia Spanier presented the paper Nurturing the post-growth city: Bringing the rural back in at the 4th International Conference of IGU commission AGLE: Thinking Rural-Urban Interactions Through Food and Land Use Issues, held in Montpellier (online).

Abstract

This paper proposes a post-growth approach to urban sustainability planning. Acknowledging the linkage between capitalism’s environmental destructiveness and its divide between the rural and the urban, the paper asks how the urban/rural divide, and its resolution, can figure in the quest for realizing environmentally sound cities. Building on a review of academic debates on urban sustainability and combining it with insights from postcolonial urban studies and diverse economies scholarship, the paper suggests lenses and empirical foci aimed at bringing the rural back into urban sustainability planning. It proposes a post-growth urban planning vision that consists of four elements: (i) reading for diversity and difference, (ii) abstaining from prioritizing the urban and the city, (iii) complicating the categories of the urban and the rural, (iv) looking for performances that reconfigure the material, cultural and power relations between rural and urban. The paper illustrates this proposal through the case of the Territorios Campesinos Agroalimentarios movement (TCA), a Colombian peasant movement that defies the boundaries of rural and urban, human and nature, and prefigures a sustainable post-growth society at the level of the territory.