ANNUAL CONGRESS 2025

Planning for conviviality

Not scheduled

20m

Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul

Oral Track 01 | POSTGROWTH URBANISM

Speaker

Luca Bertolini (University of Amsterdam)

Description

Modern urban planning was born and consolidated as a means of managing, and thereby facilitating, urban and economic growth. The recent shift to the pursuit of ‘sustainable’ or ‘green’ growth still accepts this basic orientation. Today, emergent, ‘degrowth’ and ‘post-growth’ planning are instead fundamentally questioning the focus on enabling growth, in whatever form, following the acknowledgment that there are intrinsic, inescapable connections between the pursuit of growth and current social and environmental challenges.
Degrowth and post-growth planning are, however, faced by a dilemma. On the one hand, degrowth and post-growth planning narratives, while compelling, struggle to mobilize broad constituencies and impact planning practice. On the other hand, less compelling sustainable and green growth planning narratives, appear more appealing and applicable to many. One way out of this dilemma is the development of more broadly mobilizing and more readily applicable degrowth and post-growth planning narratives. Such narratives would still have to be firmly rooted in the acknowledgment of the entanglements of current social and environmental challenges with the pursuit of urban and economic growth, but at the same time, they would have to be able to convey hope to a broad public and generate concrete options for planners aiming at ‘better places’.
I claim that Ivan Illich’s 1973 ‘Tools for Conviviality’ can provide one powerful inspiration for such a narrative, following recent applications in other fields, most notably in technology and energy. Illich was well-aware of the dilemma sketched above. He did not believe that a majority opposed to growth was feasible, or that an antigrowth minority, while feasible, was desirable. Rather, he saw a way out of the dilemma in the substitution of the dominant logic of industrial productivity with an alternative logic of ‘conviviality’, which he defined as the “autonomous creative intercourse among persons, and of persons with their environment”. One essential notion he advanced is the distinction between two phases in the development of tools (technologies, institutions): a first, in which they are primarily means for the empowerment and liberation of individuals, and a second, in which they become primarily self-referential ends, ultimately oppressive and enslaving of individuals (as illustrated in, e.g., transport by the shift from bicycles and motorized public transport to mass automobility). A second, related essential notion is the need for continuous, democratic deliberation about, and scientific inquiry in the opportunities for new tools entering the first phase, and the risks of existing tools entering the second phase.
In this paper, I explore and articulate how both Illich’s criticism of industrial productivity and his pursuit of conviviality can provide directions for a mobilizing, applicable narrative for planning beyond growth. I illustrate the argument with concrete examples from the topical domains of planning for mobility, housing, and energy, in their place-based interrelations, and discuss connections with similar undertakings in other fields.

References

Illich, I. (1973) Tools for Conviviality. London: Calder and Boyars.