Speaker
Description
Post-growth urban planning has in recent years begun to redefine urban development by foregrounding objectives beyond economic growth and towards social and ecological wellbeing. However, this emerging field has not yet considered the cultural politics that we argue are crucial in facilitating such a significant shift. This is particularly evident in the significant sociocultural and political tensions and contestations around recent progressive urban mobility initiatives.
To address this gap, we conduct ethnographic and archival research around the cultural politics of two contested mobility initiatives that we consider of interest from a post-growth perspective as ‘latent’ examples of post-growth (see Tsing, 2015): Low-traffic neighbourhoods (‘Liveable Neighbourhoods’) in Islington, London, and superblocks (superilles) in Eixample, Barcelona. Both have encountered backlash and political mobilisation against them, resulting in stalled and downscaled implementation of these ambitious initiatives. Although there are similarities in how, why and by whom these mobility interventions have been contested, they are also embedded in very different sociocultural, historic and linguistic national and urban contexts, producing distinct cultural politics of transitions that merit further study.
In this context, we foreground ‘the cultural’ as a key site of political struggles over meanings, hopes, visions and historical place attachments. We develop a more thorough account of what cultural politics means: Moving beyond a strong focus on values and imaginaries, as prevalent in post-growth (urban planning) literatures, we introduce an interdisciplinary framework of cultural politics that considers the confluence and tensions between urban planning histories, political imaginaries and affective attachments. In so doing, we argue for the importance of a more strongly humanities-informed approach to post-growth urban planning and transitions. Finally, we argue that contestation must be dealt with not only as impediments to overcome, but as integral and indeed indispensable part of (democratic) transformative processes towards post-growth cities. This in turn implies that there is a need for urban planners to (1) pay attention to cultural dimensions, loosely defined and including contradictory and messy elements, in both processes and ‘results’ of post-growth transitions and (2) to be radically open to uncertainty and emergence throughout such processes, embracing culturally diverse and variegated solutions for post-growth, refusing ‘cookie-cutter’ solutions.
| Keywords | post-growth; cultural politics; imaginaries; urban history; affect; contestation; backlash |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
