Conference Agenda

There is a growing contradiction between the usual spatial and strategic planning approaches and the existential challenges of our future. Existing planning practices might innovate towards becoming more integrated, overcoming sectoral-silo thinking, taking the functional area as basis instead of planning within administrative boundaries, striving for better multi-level governance cooperation. However, it is very rare that spatial planning considers the limits of growth. The main question of the paper is how traditional planning can be confronted with ideas for resilience, which seem to be needed to avoid the worst climate and environmental consequences of the future. In other words, how traditional planning can be opened up to alternative futures, based on space-specific considerations how economic growth as the main objective can be replaced by focusing on sufficiency, equity and human wellbeing.

In some innovative urban areas already now traces of self-limiting future planning strategies can be found, regarding future trends in the building-housing sector (regeneration instead of new construction), in the spatial planning of new development opportunities (decentralisation, no more land take, TOD), in transport issues (accessibility instead of mobility), in green and blue infrastructure (ecological fairness), in social inequality issues (public services for all), etc. Examples can also be found on innovative elements of planning and implementation of the new ideas, using more inclusive methods of debate (citizen assemblies) and more open governance patterns (functional linkages across metropolitan areas).

Such elements of self-limiting, resiliency oriented future thinking are usually in experimental stage. Even so, they can be used as disruptive ideas to shake traditional spatial planning practices. In a first step planners of an urban area can be confronted with these unusual practices. From their reactions first hypotheses can be raised on the potential ‘resilience flexibility’ of the given urban planning system (which is obviously not the same as the political flexibility of future decisions).

The paper aims to develop the details of such a ‘resilience check’ of metropolitan planning systems. As a concrete application this analysis takes place in six Central European metropolitan areas in the spring of 2025 in the framework of an ongoing Interreg CE project.

This paper draws attention to the importance of temporal infrastructures as barriers to a just, post-growth transformation of societies in the face of planetary crisis. By placing the focus on time and temporalities, the paper argues that the prevailing international political economy perpetuates barriers to exiting planetary crisis towards a more ecologically sustainable societal relationship with nature. The paper outlines a model of the complex and nested temporalities in contemporary political economy and society. It identifies four key path-dependent and nested temporalities crucial for the scholarship of transition infrastructures: (1) geological time, (2) world-history time, (3) Capitalinian time, and (4) digital time.

This paper examines the specific role of digital time. It argues that irrespective of ‘efficiencies’ promised by digital transformation, as long as contemporary digital temporalities exist within the existing political economy of compounding economic growth on a planet with biophysical limits, the character of digital time will always take the form of encouraging and increasing acceleration. Thus, the paper draws on concepts of ‘dynamic stabilisation’ of mature capitalist economies (Rosa et al 2017), its material and environmental impacts (Taffel 2022), along with the social acceleration and acceleration of the pace of life deepened by digital media (Rosa 2013; Wajcman 2022, 2015). It explores how continued social acceleration through digital temporalities can be exemplified in the so-called AI ‘revolution’. This critical approach to digital temporalities reveals how the primary function of AI is to increase efficiency and productivity, offering faster speed/pace of research, learning, and creative outputs, all within an existing ‘business as usual’ political economy centred on maximising growth and productivity, while ignoring the continued material impacts of these infrastructures.

The paper concludes that temporal infrastructures in the digital age require urgent attention. This would enhance understanding of how societies transition away from growth and ‘efficiency models’ that merely ‘fix’ environmental issues in time and space, towards ‘sufficiency’ models where traditionally marginalised activities of care, conviviality and collaboration are favoured as more socially necessary than GDP growth. It concludes by advocating a Global Commons approach to systemic transformation that takes account of uneven geographical harms of planetary crisis.

Cities have gained increasing attention in the debate on how to tackle the global environmental crisis. However, urban strategies for sustainability have often been criticized for being insufficient in effectively mitigating environmental impacts due to externalisation and cost-shifting, and for producing social contradictions, such as ecological gentrification. Rather than considering these critiques as reasons to abandon ecological urban transformations, this article advocates for the right to the ecological city, for which the goals of ecological sustainability and social justice need to be reconciled through a degrowth strategy based on the principles of sufficiency, reuse and sharing. However, this theoretical framework encounters several challenges in urban practice. These challenges are discussed through the author’s lens as an observant participant in the Fondazione di Comunità Porta Palazzo, a community foundation involved in the transformation of the neighbourhoods of Aurora and Porta Palazzo in Turin, Italy, through projects focused on public space and housing, such as the realisation of Italy's first Community Land Trust. The discussion of these challenges suggests that while the right to the ecological city is a hard to achieve, it remains an important goal in the transformation of cities and neighbourhoods, one that must rely on structural change driven by diverse actors across multiple scales.

This paper examines the move from growth to post growth infrastructures. It begins briefly sketching out the ways in which conventional infrastructure is often conceived as engines of growth, driven by logics of growth and configured accordingly. A situation that has conditioned the vast majority of the infrastructural networks through which any transition must be conducted. Some of these infrastructures may be suitable to the task and some suitable for reconfiguration either through alternative use, reuse or shifting governance regimes. Other infrastructures, however, may generate path dependencies and barriers to transition that need to be addressed through regulating, abandoning and allowing the decline of those less suitable to a world without growth. Planning, at the local, city, regional and national scale, emerges as a key practice through which decisions about which infrastructures are suitable, how they may be governed or allowed to decline can be made in dialogue with the publics (human, non-human, and those yet born). Decisions about which, where and when infrastructures are appropriate for the necessary transition away from the consequences of regimes oriented towards growth are often finely balanced and context specific. Thus, planning offers a granular working out of the process of transition often absent when such issues are considered at the abstract level of the economy, ecology or society. Instead, it offers a, albeit messy (in the absence of techno, modernist, neoliberal or populist ‘fixes’ to the problems infrastructures are constituted to solve) mechanism through which both traditional governance bodies, citizens and infrastructural publics can learn to live well among the ruins of growth.