Conference Agenda

While in the literature on informal greening practices in urban areas, these have often been discussed as political acts of guerilla gardening and commoning, representing a rebellion against neoliberal urban governance regimes and growth-oriented economies, in the cases from the Czech and Estonian context presented in this paper, the main protagonists experience these actions as mundane, everyday practices, or emotional acts of building connections with human and non-human beings in the city. Engaging in practices of care, production, gardening and provisioning, their modes of organisation rather follow an individualistic than a cooperative logic and at times they seek to avoid cooperation with other practitioners and institutional actors. Even though often not intended as transformative interventions and eluding the collaborative logics of commoning, the paper analyses the political consequences and transformative potential these informal greening practices might nevertheless entail, and discusses the wider implications for research and practice: What lessons can be drawn from these mundane practices for the green transition? Whose, if anybody’s, task is it to make these often hidden practices more visible, draw and communicate their political implications - and what are the potentials and risks of directing attention to these practices? We intend this paper to contribute to the debates on mundane informal practices that have hitherto received less attention but could give important insights in the light of socio-ecological transformations in the City.

This research explores mobility practices in the city of Santiago de Cuba, a context where very low mobility levels, low reliance on fossil fuels and high use of public transport closely mirror principles of degrowth. Within this particular landscape of urban mobility, we focus on the role of inspectores populares de transporte(“people’s transport inspectors”), a profession established during the "Special Period" in the early 1990s, a time marked by extreme scarcity of fuel, vehicles and spare parts caused by breaking of economic ties with the dissolved Soviet Union. The people’s inspectors are tasked with finding transport for passengers by hitching State-owned vehicles, which today amount to approximately 60% of Santiago’s road traffic. Put simply, the inspectors effectively collectivise State-owned resources, re-inserting them into the urban commons with every passenger they assist.

Based on 31 shadowing sessions and interviews with 36 inspectors—representing half of Santiago’s workforce in this profession—we delve into their labour as a practice that potentially contributes an actually existing degrowth mobility system. Our analysis explores how this practice is organised, how it operates, who relies on it, and the social benefits and contradictions it generates. We highlight the ways in which this system promotes resource sharing and social equity while also critically examining its limitations. In particular, focusing the question of labour, we shed light on the inspectors´ working conditions and reveal a drastic reduction in both the number of workers and the stops at which they operate. This decline coincides with a broader policy shift: a general State’s withdrawal from the transport sector and its increasing push for self-employment. Although these spatial politics alter Santiago’s geography, they are hard to resist due to limited bargaining power of trade unions and workers themselves. Moreover, the Cuban State’s ongoing ideological and economic shift towards growth-oriented and entrepreneurial logic occurs in the context of limited debate and reduced worker’s agency.

By examining the role of people’s transport inspectors within Santiago’s mobility system, this study offers a nuanced perspective on how labour practices, transport policies, and degrowth principles intersect, while critically investigating the challenges posed by the (Cuban) State’s shifting priorities.

Economic growth serves as a key organizing principle for urban systems, influencing processes from fiscal politics to spatial planning. However, recent findings suggest that continued reliance on growth-based development in already overconsuming geographies is likely to hinder the achievement of internationally agreed sustainability and justice targets, challenging planners to devise pathways beyond growth. Adopting an urban planning perspective, this paper explores the potential of centering 'the common good' in urban development as a foundation for post-growth municipalism. It focuses on the “Kleineschholz” district development project in Freiburg, Germany, which is being developed exclusively with actors oriented toward the common good. The involvement of community-led housing groups as key drivers in the project presents opportunities that extend beyond affordable and sustainable building to include the creation of community-led economies. Through an in-depth case study, the paper examines how the planning approach in Kleineschholz can shift local economies away from market- and growth-based principles towards sharing, inclusion, and sufficiency. At the same time, the creation of new building stock raises critical questions about its overall sustainability impacts and the generalizability of these developments. Ultimately, the findings highlight the highly context-specific nature of Kleineschholz while distilling general lessons for post-growth-oriented urban planning.

Growth-based urban development produces inequality, contributes to climate change and fails to deliver improvements in urban liveability for many urban residents. Yet, even progressive urban administrations are struggling to break away from growth dependency and to implement new models of socio-ecologically just urban development that is not based on growth. While a range of emancipatory policies and initiatives have been experimented with in recent years by progressive municipal administrations, many of them face contradictions due to continuously having to pursue growth to subsidize key public services and infrastructures, as well as to satisfy a hegemonic coalition of pro-growth elites.

It is therefore of high importance to first, better understand the growth dependencies faced by urban administrations. Second, we deem it essential to investigate the potential of municipalist postgrowth-oriented policies to contribute to breaking away from growth dependency, and to foster alternative models of urban development. These include policies around social reproduction, commoning, public provisioning, collectivizing infrastructure, housing, sufficiency, and others.

The proposed contribution introduces a framework for understanding and analysing urban growth dependencies. Moreover, I present a review of policies, interventions, and initiatives that have been implemented in municipalist cities and beyond, and how they have challenged urban growth dependencies. Finally, I present insights from a novel participatory methodology we are developing. The latter involves activists, public officials, policy makers and experts in a multi-step process aiming to understand the mechanisms trapping a specific city in growth dependency, and to identify leverage points and pathways to move beyond them. We are currently testing a pilot of this participatory methodology in the city of Girona, Catalonia. Girona is governed by a center-left coalition which has openly expressed interest in experimenting with postgrowth urban policy, and established an official collaboration agreement with several academic and other actors to explore possibilities with this regard.

From here, I want to spark discussions on our aim to create a practical toolkit for progressive municipalist administrations to effectively break with growth dependencies, work towards new, non growth-based models of urban developments and to create lasting conditions for a postgrowth spatial politics across different geographical scales.

This research is funded by the ERC, through the project REAL – A Postgrowth Deal.