What about the City? Towards an Urban Post-Growth Research Agenda

Abstract

This paper explores the (potential) role(s) of cities for societal shifts away from the prioritization of and dependence on economic growth. This paper is rooted in the growing field of ‘degrowth’ and ‘post-growth’ research that empirically and theoretically challenges the possibility and viability of (further) growth-based economic development. Through a systematic literature review of peer-reviewed journal articles, this paper takes stock of the increasing interest of post-growth scholars in cities and urban spaces. This paper identifies seven ways in which cities feature in the post-growth literature: as arenas, as spaces of encounter, as spaces with specific qualities, as (introversive) agents, as targets, as specific scale, and as interdependent configurations. Building on this collection of perspectives on growth-related research in (differently defined) urban contexts, this paper argues that the emergent field of urban post-growth would profit from a common frame of reference and research agenda around which urban post-growth perspectives can cohere. This paper proposes three key areas of research on post-growth in, by, and of cities while putting questions around the growth dependencies of urban systems front and center.