New publication: Nurturing the post-growth city: bringing the rural back in

Spanier, J., Feola, G. 2022. Nurturing the post-growth city: bringing the rural back in. In: Savini, F., Ferreria, A., von Schönfeld, K. C. (Eds.)  Post-Growth Planning: cities beyond the market economy. Routledge, 159-172. 

Abstract

It is widely acknowledged that cities are destructive to the environment and the natural resources that sustain human and non-human life (Næss et al., 2020). Any planning for post-growth cities must take on the challenge of resolving the currently prevailing dissonance between urban societies and the ecosystems on which they draw to survive. The urban sustainability scholarship has put forward numerous proposals to resolve the dissonance between cities and their natural environments, and their ideas can greatly inform post-growth visions of ecologically sound cities. However, rather than over-hastily choosing from these proposals the perfect blueprint for ecologically sound post-growth cities, we would like to use this chapter to slow down and take a step back. Looking at proposals for ecologically sustainable cities, we find a shared excitement about and predisposition to the concept and socio-natural reality of the city. There is no drastic break with the idea of cities as compatible with, or even crucial for, the achievement of ecologically sound futures. This belief in cities is certainly not always shared in more radical contributions, but even in those cases, we find an optimistic idea of the city as a space of disruption and revolution. However, is it sufficient to solely enquire ecologically sound post-growth cities? Are the notions of the ‘city’ and the ‘urban’ able to accommodate and prefigure post-growth futures in which humans and more-than-humans thrive? Or might planning for post-growth cities need to extend the frame beyond the urban? To engage with this question, we embed the problem of urban unsustainability in the history and present of capitalist societies. Marxist and political ecologist accounts of the evolution of capitalism provide useful insights into the relationship between capitalism’s environmental destructiveness and the rift between the rural and the urban. Building on these understandings, we review academic debates on ecologically sustainable cities, enquiring how they consider the rel ationship between the nature/society and urban/rural divides. From this, and building on feminist and postcolonial urban studies and the diverse economies agenda, we draw lessons for a post-growth vision for urban sustainability planning that contributes to the mending of these binary rifts. We propose conceptual lenses and empirical foci to extend post-growth urban sustainability planning beyond the frame of the city. We use the case of the Colombian movement Territorios Campesinos Agroalimentarios to illustrate our proposal.