Speaker
Description
Although acritically reported as steadily galloping for the next decades, based on recent trends, global urbanisation is not exempt from either physico-ecological and social issues and related limits, just like the well-known ones dealt with by Meadows et al. (1972) and by Hirsch (1976). As a matter of fact, natural systems follow pulsing paradigms (Odum et al., 1995), with successions of growth, peak, and descent phases; acknowledging this, and consequently adapting to the right phase can make the "way down" prosperous (Odum & Odum, 2011). Prosperous is an adjective also related to the political proposal of degrowth (Kallis et al., 2012), which can be seen as a step toward a postgrowth societies (in the pulsing paradigm, theoretically this would not exclude novel growth phases in the future). More and more discourses are emerging around the concepts of postgrowth cities and postgrowth urbanism (Xue, 2022; Savini et al. 2023), often pursuing stronger forms of socio-ecological sustainability and resilience altogether (Cristiano et al., 2020). As a part of a stream of founding contributions in such a novel field, a transdisciplinary recognition is here offered to possibly understand the physico-ecological foundations of spatial dynamics, with a focus on human settlements and their relations with the rest of nature. More specifically, all of this is framed - qualitatively - in the systems thinking and diagramming notions behind the above-mentioned scientific literature and - quantitatively - in the systems designs that ecosystems and other self-organising systems develop to reinforce energy use (Odum, 1988), also resorting to the algebra of the eMergy theory (Odum, 1996), to the maxiumum power principle (Lotka, 1922) and to the maximum empower principle (Odum, 1988; 2002). On top of providing an unprecedented literature review bridging all of these topics in and urban and regional planning perspective, this study aims at producing new knowledge out of the reading of (human) spatial systems through these "hard science" lenses, also launching debates around the many possible extensive declinations of the concept of energy (after all complying with the notion of eMergy as a memory of energy and other resources), also including both "wealth" and basic livelihoods, crucially representing - this is one of our hypothesis - respectively drivers of competition in a growth phase and societal flows to try to secure in other times. Far from offering a complete scientific work, some research lines are here offered for dialectic use in the scientific arena - with a strong orientation toward the scholars of urban, regional, and landscape design and planning - towards a plural scientific toolbox to feed the emerging field of postgrowth urbanism with both "hard" and "soft" science inputs, and transdisciplinary ones.
References
Cristiano, S. et al. (2020). On the systemic features of urban systems. A look at material flows and cultural dimensions to address post-growth resilience and sustainability. Frontiers in Sustainable Cities
Hirsch, F. (1976). Social limits to growth
Kallis, G. et al. (2012). The economics of degrowth. Ecological Economics
Lotka, A. J. (1922). Contribution to the energetics of evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Meadows, D. H., et al. (1972). The Limits to Growth
Odum, H. T. (1988). Self-organization, transformity, and information. Science
Odum, H. T. (1996). Environmental Accounting: Emergy and Environmental Decision Making
Odum, H. T. (2002). Explanations of ecological relationships with energy systems concepts. Ecological Modelling
Odum, H. T., & Odum, E. C. (2011). A prosperous way down
Odum, W. E. et al. (1995). Nature’s Pulsing Paradigm. Estuaries
Savini, F. et al. (Eds.). (2022). Post-growth planning: Cities beyond the market economy. Routledge
Xue, J. (2022). Planning law and post-growth transformation. In Savini et al. (Eds). Routledge.
| Keywords | systems thinking; spatial metabolism; maximum (em)power; spatial planning; eMergy theory |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
