Speaker
Description
The article investigates how (bio-)regional identity mediates the rearrangement of urban-rural relations in the planning of sustainable regional economies. It researches the issue of identity within the emergent field of degrowth urban and planning studies. Degrowth scholarship largely neglect the issue of identity and can be accused to run the risk of co-option by far-right ideologies. Drawing on post-structuralist regionalism, we argue that (bio)regions and their identities are contested, power-laden constructs rather than fixed entities. The paper focuses on the city-region of Vienna, and in the ‘operational landscape’ of Marchfeld as a case study. We examine how place-based identity is constructed by the actors involved to mediate the conflicts over city and rural areas around issues of agroecology, sand extraction, and the bioeconomy. The paper advocates for a more critical research on identity issues in degrowth research and its analysis in the construction of regional scales.
| Keywords | degrowth; (bio-)regions; identity; scale |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
