Format/Structure

Conventional session: 4-5 contributions who we will ask to present their work for 10 minutes each, followed by a discussion with the audience.

Long Abstract

This session explores municipalist projects, policy experiments and movements that challenge growth dependencies in municipal policy. Urban development and economic growth are closely tied. This becomes evident when neighbours find themselves confronted with the capitalist drive to extract ever-increasing profits from urban land, housing, and public services, when cities are compelled to engage in intensifying inter-urban competition, when ever more landscapes are reshaped by extraction, production and logistics to serve urban lifestyles. Initiatives under the umbrella term of radical municipalism have presented a counter-hegemonic project to contest this dominant model of urban development. They mobilise around economic reorganization, democratisation of political decision-making, the feminization of politics and ecological transformation; often employing a strategy of dual power from within and outside municipal institutions.

How do radical municipalist initiatives build hope and mobilize around a shared political horizon? How can municipalist parties contest growth dependency in urban policy-making, despite bureaucratic inertia and pressures from local growth coalitions? How do grassroots movements and municipalist political parties interact, challenge each other, and nourish or limit their respective agendas? How can cities and towns start developing inter-scalar strategies to foster solidarity instead of competition and start reshaping the urban-rural dualism? What can postgrowth thinking and practice contribute to radical municipalism?

For this session, we invite contributions on the above questions. We are interested in analyses of attempts by urban governments to implement postgrowth-inspired policies, of municipal political campaigns around postgrowth-adjacent objectives, of inter-scalar initiatives to rethink urban-rural relationships in a postgrowth direction, and of municipal dual power strategies in action, as well as movement-party interactions. Methodologically, we encourage participatory and action-research approaches that forge collaborations with municipal administrations or social movements, but also case study and fieldwork-based studies on cities, municipal governments and social movements that are attempting to implement postgrowth-adjacent agendas.

This Panel has 6 pending paper proposals.
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