Roundtable: Transformations to post-growth – Positions, perspectives, and prospects for people and planet

Description

AESOP 2025
Roundtable Submission - 15 January 2025 

Organiser

Christian Lamker
University of Groningen, the Netherlands
c.w.lamker@rug.nl

Panel

Luca Bertolini
University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands
l.bertolini@uva.nl

Thomas Hartmann
TU Dortmund University, Germany
thomas.hartmann@tu-dortmund.de

Astrid Krisch
University of Oxford, United Kingdom
astrid.krisch@kellogg.ox.ac.uk

Sophie Sturup
Xian Jiaotong-Liverpool University (China)
Sophie.Sturup@xjtlu.edu.cn

The invitation to actively participate has been given to everyone involved in the podcast series ‘Becoming a Post-Growth Planner: Obstacles and Challenges to Changing Roles and Practices’ between 2020 and 2025.

Title

Post-Growth Planning is… Positions, perspectives, and prospects for people and planet

Abstract

Post-growth thoughts have made a massive leap forward into wider planning circles. This is not least visible in a broad recognition at the annual congress of AESOP itself where four of eighteen tracks explicitly seek for links to post-growth or degrowth. Over the course of a few years, a growing range of planning scholars has been engaged in finding and developing fruitful connections for planning research and practice. Some focus on using post-growth and degrowth critiques for understanding deficiencies of current approaches, paradigms, and practices in spatial planning. Multiple obstacles, challenges, and barriers, surface at the intersection of a growth-oriented planning that itself is nested in growth-oriented conceptualisations of economy and society. Other scholars focus on developing ways forward to improving institutions, instruments and tools towards just and sustainable post-growth futures.

This roundtable takes up discussions in the podcast series ‘Becoming a Post-Growth Planner: Obstacles and Challenges to Changing Roles and Practices’. Since 2020, the series hosted interviews with 30 key thinkers about contemporary planning and potentials for a transformation towards growth-independent roles and practices. Each of the episodes leads to an idea and rough definition of ingredients of post-growth planning at the end. We reflect ideas about what “Post-Growth Planning is…” in this roundtable. We invite the audience to critically reflect on the potential to use these thoughts to foster the transformative agency of spatial planning in the critical attempt “to shift our thinking and adopt alternative approaches that prioritize the people and the planet” (AESOP 2025, Call for Papers).

Key words

Post-Growth Planning – Sustainability – Transformative Agency – Role of Planners

References

Becker, J., Bergamo, J. N., Fortuny Sicart, A., Greaves, S., Keurhorst, N., Lloveras Gutiérrez, J., Pansera, M., Robra, B., Schramm, E., & Suárez Eiroa, B. (Eds.). (2024). Critiques of growth: an introduction. Universidad de Vigo. https://doi.org/10.35869/CritiquesofGrowth

Durrant, D., Lamker, C. W., & Rydin, Y. (2023). The Potential of Post-Growth Planning: Re-Tooling the Planning Profession for Moving beyond Growth. Planning Theory & Practice, 24(2), 287–295. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649357.2023.2198876 (Comment).

Lamker, C. W., & Schulze Dieckhoff, V. (2019). Sechs Thesen einer Postwachstumsplanung. FRU-Preis 2019, Sonderpreis. Kollektiv Postwachstumsplanung. http://www.postwachstumsplanung.de https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.30670.20800

Rydin, Y. (2025). Planning Without Growth. Policy Press, an imprint of Bristol University Press.

Savini, F., Ferreira, A., & Schönfeld, K. C. von (Eds.). (2022). Post-Growth Planning: Cities beyond the market economy. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003160984

Period	9 Jul 2025
Event title	AESOP 2025: Planning as a Transformative Action in an Age of Planetary Crisis
Event type	Conference
Conference number	37th
Location	Istanbul, TurkeyShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International