We propose one special session on post-growth in the urbanized periphery. There is a growing body of literature analysing the principles of degrowth across the specific challenges of urban planning and urban studies. However, this scholarship remains overwhelmingly urban, and empirical work primarily focused on experiences of planning for infrastructural degrowth in large capital cities.
This session seeks to focus the postgrowth debate on those territories beyond the traditional dense and bounded city core, on the urbanized periphery or suburbs as a critical space, given (1) not only its growing nature-more than 87 % of the European population will live in the urbanized periphery of cities or suburban areas by 2050-, but also its (2) unsustainability linked to high consumption levels, financial cost of running infrastructures, and social inequalities across metropolitan areas; and (3) its vulnerability to climate change as recognised by the last IPCC report. While mainstream literature has characterized the urbanized periphery as physically and socially homogenous (primarily influenced by the suburban Anglo-Saxon paradigm) and has presented its densification (hence growth) as the main solution to tackle their financial, social and environmental issues; some scholarship has challenged the homogenous nature of the urbanized periphery and explored alternative paths that optimize suburbs’ spatial and socio-technical or infrastructural characteristics to achieve a postgrowth model (Sieverts & Lerup, 2012; Alexander & Gleeson, 2019). These authors suggest that alternative forms of infrastructural production such as physically decentralised and off-grid infrastructures, or alternative forms of infrastructural ownership and management such as community-led infrastructures are better suited in cities’ peripheries and offer an alternative and hopeful path for their future. In this context we seek contributions exploring questions such as (but not limited to):
- Can we find projects/agendas/initiatives across the urbanized periphery of cities (on issues such as water, sanitation, health, education, care, food production, etc.) that challenge the densification and growth paradigm? And how does the heterogenous socio-economic and spatial character of the urbanized periphery influence the implementation of these post-growth initiatives?
- How are these initiatives materialising and what actors are guiding them? Can we find processes of postgrowth that go beyond individual/singular experiences? And if not, how can we upscale them? Does the critical suburban governance literature offer a valid framework to understand these?
- And what kind of post-growth imaginaries are guiding these initiatives? Are these linked to processes of planning in the context of economic stagnation or contraction or are these guided by political agendas that seek to envision a post-capitalist world? Can these two be reconciled to secure a better quality of life for suburban dwellers?
- Do European policies ease or hamper the capacity of local and regional actors (re)producing and/or governing cities’ peripheries to implement post-growth policies, projects and/or initiatives?
The format we are proposing is a traditional one, but we will provide a template for contributors to respond to, so we can structure presentations and discussions to align either types of infrastructures, regions, or any other theme that may emerge