- Convenors:
-
Sarah Bretschko
(Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB))
Borja Nogué Algueró
- Format:
- Panel
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.
Accepted papers
Presentation short abstract
The paper examines the process in which a small coastal town in Japan developed its preference for town planning dissociated with growthism, the demographic, economic, and cultural impacts of this preference, and how it balances its postgrowth strategy with growth-oriented national planning policy.
Presentation long abstract
As postgrowth planning is scarcely observed in reality, shrinking cities are acknowledged as precious examples of planning practices dissociated with the growth-oriented paradigm. This paper conducts a case study of Manazuru, Japan, a small, shrinking coastal town who deliberately chose to stay small amidst speculative developments in the nearby towns in the 1980s-90s. Throughout the 1990 and 2000s, the town of Manazuru enacted strong regulations against large-scale speculative second house developments, incorporated “aesthetic guidelines” in their planning documents to preserve its traditional landscape, and through a referendum, chose not to merge with nearby towns and cities. Today, the town aims to become a “Small, Slow and Smart” town through endorsing compact planning paired with improved public transport and walkability, smart city technologies, and local currency. The town has been exhibiting a postgrowth approach for several decades, a rarity in Japanese planning context, to preserve its landscape and cultural identity.
By conducting a content analysis of policy documents, as well as interviews of local decision makers, this paper 1) examines the process in which the town of Manazuru came to develop its preference for smallness, 2) assesses the demographic, economic, and cultural influences of this decision by comparing with nearby towns who chose a more growth-oriented path, and 3) analyzes how the town balances its postgrowth strategy with growth-oriented national level planning policy. The case study offers empirical evidence of a postgrowth approach at the municipality level.
Presentation long abstract
The research examines how three urban spatial growth strategies- urban intensification, urban extensification, and decentralized peripheral densification can shape environmental sustainability in the hyper-dense cities in the Global South, using Dhaka as a case study. A mixed-method design integrates field observations, literature review, and semi-structured interviews with key informants. Multi-Criteria Analysis across seven environmental indicators shows that decentralized infrastructure-led suburban densification performs best, while core-area compact intensification performs worst. The findings reveal that in extremely dense cities, compact city models can intensify environmental degradation, whereas suburban development offers more sustainable outcomes. The study highlights the political ecological implications of density, infrastructure inequality, and uneven urban growth in Dhaka. It contributes to debates on environmentally sustainable urban growth and embedded political and power relations in Dhaka. It contributes to debates on a sustainable urban future by linking compact and polarized city theories with empirical municipal policy evaluation in the Global South.
Presentation short abstract
A municipalism-inspired, citizen-led council reshaped urban planning through radical participation—both grassroots and institutionalised—challenging growth dependency while navigating tensions between ecological ambition, democratic inclusion, and bureaucratic resistance.
Presentation long abstract
The French municipality of Saillans (pop. 1,300) is often cited as a pioneering example of citizen-led municipalism, though its implementation only partially aligned with theoretical frameworks. This case study examines how grassroots democracy can challenge growth dependencies in local policymaking, focusing on the revision of the Local Urban Plan (PLU)—a legally binding framework for housing, mobility, and land use. The research adopts a transdisciplinary approach, with the author serving as both researcher and elected official.
Saillans combined institutional governance with grassroots mobilization, resembling a dual-power strategy. The PLU revision process, spanning three years, engaged roughly one-third of residents through public workshops, randomly selected citizen panels, do-ocracy groups, and reflexive monitoring. The goal was to co-produce a PLU aligned with post-growth principles, democratizing decision-making while advancing ecological planning.
The results highlight both achievements and persistent tensions. While the PLU successfully limited urban sprawl and promoted ecological housing, the process faced internal conflicts—stemming from competing visions of democracy—and external constraints, such as regulatory frameworks, bureaucratic inertia, and opposition from landowners. These challenges exposed divergent understandings of citizenship, ranging from representative duty to deliberative participation, as well as tensions between lifestyle changes and property rights.
Theoretically, Saillans illustrates how municipalist-inspired practices can challenge growth dependency through direct democracy. However, it also reveals their vulnerability to multi-scalar resistance, including political, cultural, economic, and bureaucratic barriers. The experiment ultimately underscores the delicate balance between inclusion, ecological ambition and community cohesion.
Presentation short abstract
Despite its postgrowth potential, we argue that Scotland’s experimentation with Community Wealth Building policies has been absorbed into technocratic practice that has limited contestation and curbed structural change, which reveals the need for a more radical agenda we term democratic localism.
Presentation long abstract
Traditional, growth-orientated models of urban development are increasingly challenged by a range of alternative economic visions and political projects, including radical municipalism and other local innovations. One version of this, from which proponents of municipalist projects might learn, is community wealth building (CWB) – a transnationally mobile policy that has seen some uptake in the US and UK. Although CWB offers a potentially radical contribution to postgrowth urbanism by encouraging plural models of economic ownership and aspiring to partially decommodify land and labour, it has met scepticism within the local state, drawn criticism from community groups, and so far failed to ignite the political imagination or institutional rupture needed to challenge urban growth dynamics. In this paper, we aim to unravel this puzzle by exploring how CWB is being developed and mobilised in Scotland. While radical municipalism seeks to politicise local economies through grassroots struggle, we show that CWB in Scotland has been absorbed with minimal contention. We further problematise the policy mobilities literature to argue that the widespread uptake of CWB policies in Scotland has not been matched by imaginative experimentation, but remains stuck in a technocratic rebranding of existing activity. As such, we argue that the domestication of CWB in Scotland exposes the limits of policy activism and the politics of policy mobility across national, municipal and community levels, and points to the risk of transformative localist agendas being discursive rather than structural. This tension sets the ground for a more ambitious alternative that we term ‘democratic localism’.
Presentation short abstract
This paper explores the limits of post-growth municipalism in Barcelona and London. Through archival and ethnographic analysis, we unpack the contested cultural politics of urban mobility transformations and reflect on pathways to strengthen post-growth municipalism through agonistic pluralism.
Presentation long abstract
Post-growth municipalist initiatives are frequently met with complex and multi-faceted resistance, often driven by local growth coalitions. Yet there is insufficient research unpacking how exactly the dynamics of contestation can hinder or enable progressive urban change. In theory, both post-growth and municipalism encourage transformation processes that are shaped by democratic co-creation and agonistic pluralism but, in practice, conflicting interests and imaginaries can stall and water down initiatives which are sometimes abandoned altogether. To explore this tension, we study the evolution of two potentially post-growth urban mobility transformations: the Superblocks in l’Eixample, Barcelona, and Liveable Neighbourhoods in Islington, London. Both initiatives contain post-growth imaginaries of slowness and conviviality but in neither Barcelona (once an emblematic example of municipalism) nor London (governed by a traditional centre-left party) did post-growth imaginaries flourish and develop into a shared political horizon. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, we explore how the post-growth potential of these initiatives was overshadowed by (1) elite capture of their imaginaries which (2) fuelled corrosive antagonism, especially visible in print and social media, and (3) was intensified by the tight timescales of urban experimentalism that limited opportunities for productive, agonistic contestation and cultural acceptance. We compare the cultural politics of contestation in both cases, and the ways in which technocratic and paternalistic attitudes foreclosed agonistic pluralism even in the context of Barcelona’s municipalist city government. We conclude by reflecting on the lessons which emerge for post-growth municipalism, especially the need for a new and more holistic approach to political listening.
Presentation short abstract
Starting from a post-socialist perspective, this paper looks at how to prepare future urban planners to bring about postgrowth cities. What are key characteristics of pedagogical programmes that address postgrowth topics, what skills are fostered and how do they generate transformation?
Presentation long abstract
In post-socialist cities of Romania, civil society actors are addressing ecological transformations and empowering local communities to participate in political decision making. These initiatives can be interpreted as the starting point of a municipalist movement in a society with a young democracy, characterized by little civic engagement and high distrust between citizens and public institutions.
Considering this context, this paper is taking one step forward, aiming to understand the potential of pedagogical programmes in generating transformation, in order to prepare the next generation of urban planning professionals to facilitate participatory processes for just and sustainable cities.
This research includes case study analysis of two Living Labs located in Bucharest, belonging to two distinct educational programmes relating to postgrowth topics: 1. sustainable food systems planning, and 2. community cultural centers as infrastructures for public participation.
The data was gathered by participating as a student in the two semester-long programmes and the subsequent actions, and conducting interviews with the tutors of the Living Labs during a two year follow-up.
The results represent a set of guidelines for designing pedagogical programmes that foster facilitating skills, like including action-research methods, transdisciplinary collaborations, horizontal hierarchical structures etc. Following the programme, students, tutors and organisers demonstrated a higher capacity for collaboration.
As changing existing systems takes time, designing appropriate pedagogical programmes is one of the ways to ensure commitment and financial sustainability for a group of tutors and students, generating transformation through knowledge exchange, with possible long-term effects that are yet to be determined.
Presentation short abstract
Care Municipalism could link care, welfare transformation, and post-growth politics, transforming institutions to build care commons and envisoning earthcare infrastructures that reconnect human and planetary wellbeing, grounding transitions in shared responsibility and lived practices of care.
Presentation long abstract
In Caring Democracy, Tronto explained why market fetishisation fails to achieve equity in basic social provisioning and made a case for social citizenship based on the universal right to care and democratic redistribution of care responsibilities. Meanwhile, emerging literature on eco-social and careful political economy unpacks links between care, equality, and climate. Care services represent forms of work compatible with a low-carbon economy, requiring little to no extraction of environmental resources. Freeing our time for care aligns with decentring economic growth as society’s compass. Nevertheless, scholarship on welfare transformations, public policies and post-growth has remained largely unconnected, and degrowth postulates have often been criticised for being addressed in the void.
Care Municipalism has the potential to bridge scholarship on welfare transformation, post-growth, care, and social change, fostering provision beyond environmentally and socially harmful productivism. This concept and political project envisions a concrete articulation of local political community through public and autonomous spaces and institutions for commoning care. Based on exploratory interviews with those fostering change in this direction in European and Latin American contexts, this study explores existing and possible frameworks of public–communitarian collaborations and instruments to democratise care, such as care councils. Moreover, it envisions earthcare infrastructures capable of dissolving the ontological separation between “social” and “ecological” care. Recognising Nature’s caring work, they would foster reconnection between human and planetary wellbeing. In doing so, Care Municipalism emerges as a strategic pathway to ground post-growth transition in lived democratic practice and shared responsibility for sustaining life.
Presentation short abstract
Effective communication strategies are a prerequisite for any impactful political project. We conducted more than 50 interviews with post-growth-minded public officials across Europe to understand which language and arguments they found most useful to foster post-growth approaches in their work.
Presentation long abstract
Effective communication strategies are a prerequisite for any impactful political project. While there has been some research on how post-growth approaches could be most effectively communicated to the public, we lack an understanding of which language and arguments are the most useful for public officials to contest growth dependencies in (urban) policymaking and support a post-growth agenda within political institutions. To help answer these questions, we have conducted more than 50 interviews and one workshop with civil servants, elected officials, and civil society actors across seven European countries.
Our preliminary results suggest that which framings and arguments are most useful depends on the context and on the position individuals hold. The local level is seen as more favorable to post-growth framings than higher governance scales due to a greater focus on practical problem solving. Within political institutions, interviewees suggest linking to widely shared challenges of resource and capacity constraints and focusing on redefining resilience and efficiency in non-growth-oriented ways. Introducing alternative measurement frameworks is further seen as a useful tool to argue for the priorization of post-growth aligned projects and policies. To support the broader post-growth agenda, interviewees suggest focusing on hopeful framings of post-growth societies rather than directly criticizing growth. Since data collection took place across governance scales, our findings could inform political campaigns and urban governments advancing post-growth approaches on the municipal scale, as well as local actors' communication strategies towards higher governance scales.
Presentation short abstract
Through qualitative interviews in five EU cities, we assess policymakers’ and civil servants’ perceptions of the effectiveness, limits and potential of local climate governance. Results show strong local leadership but persistent barriers in competences, resources and multilevel coordination.
Presentation long abstract
Over 70% of global CO2 emissions occur within the boundaries of cities, whose growing populations make the need for effective local climate policies increasingly urgent. Nevertheless, the contribution of city policies to greenhouse gas mitigation remains both constrained and highly divergent among countries.
This study investigates the role of local governments in addressing the climate crisis in Barcelona, Berlin, Milan, Paris, and Prague. Through a systematic qualitative analysis of interviews with policymakers and civil servants working in climate, environmental, urban planning and mobility areas, we assess their perceptions of the effectiveness, limitations and potential of local climate governance. To this end, we identify perceived strengths and weaknesses of cooperation with regional, national, and EU levels and examine how legislation, regulations and the distribution of competences at higher governance levels shape local climate action. We also analyse how these perceptions differ across cities in light of their distinct governance structures and professional backgrounds of respondents.
Across the five cities, interviewees emphasise a significant local role in multilevel climate governance, with the strongest climate leadership found in Barcelona and Paris. This holds particularly true for areas where municipal governments hold relatively strong competences, such as mobility, urban planning and climate adaptation. Common cross-cutting barriers include limited financial and human capacities, insufficient competences, lack of coordination across governance levels, and bureaucratic hurdles that delay or constrain implementation. Key needs for accelerating local climate action involve stable long-term regulatory and funding frameworks alongside stronger cooperation with, and support from, regional and national governments.