Systemic changes needed for degrowth to be successful – coop between global north and south is key

The fourth step this SI proposes as a means towards spatialising degrowth is the acknowledgement and systematic documentation of the role that insurgent urban experts and professionals can play in promoting degrowth agendas. This category includes architects, designers, planners, academics, care workers, teachers, technology and IT experts, medical and care professionals, who can link degrowth agendas to everyday spatialised practices of building, caring, mobility, education, etc. Schismenos et al. (2020) use the term ‘cosmolocalism’ to describe local experts who develop locally but distribute globally the technologies and practices that prioritise socio-ecological well-being over corporate profits. We argue that these overlooked insurgent professionals can enrich and facilitate the work of social movements in enacting change and in reshaping ‘lifestyle strategies’. This SI discusses examples of design and technology activism, housing and water commoning, and alternative transport initiatives, driven or catalysed by experts and professionals. De Castro Mazarro et al. (2023) empirically substantiate this with a survey of more than 400 designs in four international exhibitions on sustainable architecture and design, which identifies architectural practices that successfully reduce the embodied carbon of their interventions through simple technologies and design layouts that question growth-oriented construction regimes and urban development logics.

Step five: Greeting the elephant in the room: The North/South dialectics of institutional and activist degrowth practices

The fifth step we propose towards building a degrowth spatial agenda is to address the elephant in the room; namely the significant differences between the Global North and the Global South when it comes to advocating and implementing degrowth agendas and practices. We openly query whether it is even possible to articulate into a common urban degrowth agenda the very different drivers and dynamics of urbanisation in the Global South (migration, consumerism, etc.) and the Global North (real estate speculation, tourism, services, migration and refugee flows etc). How would an international degrowth urban agenda affect planning institutions and practices differently in the North and the South? How would such a nonuniversalist agenda relate to alternatives to development situated in the Global South, such as Buen Vivir, Ubuntu and Ecological Swaraj? Exposing the North/South specificities, Schindler et al.’s (2023) article in this SI documents how progressive degrowth initiatives in ‘ordinary cities’ in low and middle income countries are often combined with businessas-usual urban entrepreneurialism. The authors propose the term ‘subordinate degrowth’ for this phenomenon and argue that any realistic degrowth strategy in low and middle income countries must account for local forms of ‘messiness’ and indeterminacy.

Although it is possible to imagine degrowth inspired socio-ecological metabolisms confined within small locales in the Global North or South, a global agenda for degrowth or post-growth urbanisation would require the global transformation of these metabolisms. Significant academic and policy work needs to be done to articulate what a degrowth agenda for the Global North might mean for the Global South. And vice versa.

But it is not enough to only address the North–South dynamics, when acknowledging and prefiguring the – almost necessarily – uneven outcomes that spatial degrowth practices will have. We also need to prefigure how degrowth will affect marginalised populations within the same geographical regions in the Global South and North alike. To do this, we need to engage with important but often neglected questions of labour and class relations around which degrowth spatial agendas necessarily have to be organised. We argue that any degrowth spatial agenda has to engage seriously with Barca’s (2019) understanding of work as a (gendered and racialised) mediator of social metabolism. The growth and expansion of globalised capitalism are still dependent on an increasingly unequal global ecological exchange; on exploiting the cheapest labour and raw materials wherever and whenever these might be available; on unequal transfers of labour (embodied in consumer products), land, water, sun and energy (embodied in agricultural products) from the Global South to the Global North (Heinberg, 2020; Hornborg, 2021a). But Barca’s pioneering work has not yet received the attention it deserves both by degrowth scholars and by spatial scientists and policymakers. And this special issue only superficially touches upon these questions.

Conclusion: The urgency of developing a spatial degrowth agenda The crucial socio-environmental condition we are in demands alternatives to the hegemonic growth-driven practices that shape environments and societies in the Global South and North.

Forging a close dialogue between critical urban studies and degrowth can open possibilities in that direction. This special issue contributes to this dialogue, suggesting five steps that sketch a pathway towards developing a programmatic, yet pragmatic, urban degrowth agenda (summarised in Table 1).

Our call for building a spatial degrowth agenda is urgent, as the current focus of degrowth scholarship on either small-scale localised practices or macro-economic proposals will not do. On the one hand, smallscale degrowth practices are not sufficient to offset the destructive effects of the ever growing and lengthening global supply chains (Heinberg, 2020). On the other hand, macroeconomic proposals are too far removed from everyday life to serve as a convincing counter-hegemonic narrative to the ideology of growth. Even the undisputable impact of continuous growth on greenhouse emissions and human health (UNEP, 2020), and the high toll in human lives claimed every year by recurrent fire and flood disasters across the world (Hornborg, 2021a, 2021b, 2021c) are apparently not strong or shocking enough to propel citizens and policymakers into questioning the imaginary of growth as a panacea for a better life.

It is now widely acknowledged that the growth of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) alone cannot deliver human welfare or happiness (Fanning and O’Neill, 2019; Helliwell et al., 2022). Yet, growth and ecological modernisation narratives remain hegemonic and strongly rooted in political and economic practice for organising the necessary transitions to post-carbon socio-natural metabolisms; But perhaps more importantly, growth narratives remain rooted in everyday imaginaries as the only solutions (Fioramonti, 2013; Hickel et al., 2022; Whitehead, 2013a). The much anticipated and fought for European Green Deal is a case in point. It could become a positive step forward towards degrowth urban futures; but it can easily end up advocating – or even subsidising – yet another round of ecological modernisation and ‘greenwashed’ growth models (Mastini et al., 2021).

Degrowth can provide an alternative imaginary for the future. But this imaginary has to be transformed into spatial images, plans and practices for it to start having significant impact and effect. As noted in the Kaika et al. 1205 introduction, if degrowth fails to address questions of urbanisation and spatial politics, it runs the risk of becoming yet another discourse for internal academic and activist consumption, an empty signifier that allows us to keep our souls clean – as it were – by staying clear of the political arena, while growth continues being the dominant paradigm for urban and regional development practices. The recent IPCC reports (2021, 2022) that drew public attention to the link between climate change and growth logics have opened a window of opportunity for legitimising and pushing forward a public spatial degrowth agenda. Needless to say, systematic, international comparative work is necessary to articulate a spatial degrowth agenda that can avoid following a path similar to sustainability agendas, that is, greenwashing economic expansion. But we argue that even the risk of ‘watering down’ degrowth when we put it into spatial practice is a risk worth taking. Here, we start a dialogue between degrowth scholars and urban scholars. A broader dialogue between scholars, urban experts, professionals, policymakers, and activists also needs to open, in order to bring spatial degrowth agendas from paper to life.