Speaker
Description
While many scholars have, over decades, repeatedly challenged planning’s position as a key functionary in the socioecological iniquities of capitalism, its essential growth rationality has remained largely untouched. This is perhaps unsurprising, as urban growth management is very much planning’s raison d'être. Hence, the idea that continuous growth might be an impossible, but also highly undesirable, goal for planning has been engaged with only to a very limited extent in the literature. In the absence of growth, planning’s conventional discourses, values and ideologies fall away, confounding much of how we think about praxis and the reality upon which it is built. The phenomenon of urban abandonment in many post-industrial shrinking cities, where the conditions for urban growth has broken down, has therefore been theorised as presenting a possible counterpoint for challenging growth as planning’s key doctrine, liberating physical and discursive spaces that could conceivably be exploited to articulate fundamental questioning of received planning wisdom. However, there remains a theoretical vacuum to guide action. In recognition of this lacuna, using two pedagogical sites of grassroots experimentation emerging from the urban crisis conditions of Buffalo and Detroit in the USA, this paper will argue that Lefebvre’s inimitable ‘Right to the City’, and particularly his utopian concern with producing ‘other’ worlds beyond capitalism, offers a rich, yet largely untapped, theoretical counterpart to interpenetrate the commonality between the literature on urban shrinkage and the analogous heterodox concept of degrowth, and as a novel contribution for advancing the possibility of a transformative post-growth planning paradigm.
| Keywords | Post-Growth, Planning, Lefebvre, Shrinkage |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
