Speaker
Description
Green growth is currently the dominant paradigm in spatial planning. This approach equates living standards with economic wealth and assumes that technological innovation can reconcile the increase of financial wealth with ecological targets. However, it is increasingly evident that green growth fails to achieve social and ecological objectives. Today, growth aggravates, rather than preventing, unprecedented levels of global inequality and ecological destruction.
Spatial planning has long been aware of these issues but has not changed course. Instead, it has confined itself, with limited success, to managing green growth. Planning promotes green, nature-based, circular, and smart innovations, to create economic resources to be then captured for social purposes. So far, however, this approach has failed to make essential services and spatial qualities more accessible or affordable. It has also fallen short of sustainability targets.
Instead, it has trapped planners in an endless cycle of fostering economic competitiveness on the one hand, while seeking to mitigate the negative social and environmental impacts of this process on the other. To address worsening affordability and ecological crises, planning tends to further increase the transfer of public wealth into private hands.
The talk will begin by exposing the limits of planning for green growth. It will demonstrate that the expansion of urban centers relies on the exhaustion of land and labor, both in affluent and in poorer regions. This has intensified the power divides between rich and poor, urban and rural, imperial core and periphery. Simultaneously, it has trapped planning in a vicious cycle of growth promotion and green management, which is increasingly difficult to navigate.
Next, the talk will introduce a new planning paradigm, which prioritizes satiation: the fulfillment of essential needs through the provision of essential services. Satiation refers to expanding essential services for the many by intentionally reducing excessive wealth and environmentally harmful activities. The focus on meeting needs can foster just and regenerative relationships between urban areas and their global hinterlands. Satiation is the core of both postgrowth and degrowth critiques of current economies.
The talk underlines that the need for satiation has gained momentum in planning and argues that planners have the tools already to bring this impulse to life. An increasing number of planning scholars and practitioners are aware of the limitations of their existing frameworks and toolkits. What is lacking, however, is the public and political support required to embrace an alternative planning paradigm: a strategic impulse. The talk will address this strategic challenge and explore pathways for institutional change that build on existing practices to create planning futures that overcome the limitations and impasses of green growth.
