Planning in nature's metropolis: Metabolic municipalism and ecological planning in Barcelona

Abstract

Democratic economic planning is emerging once again after decades of marginalisation. This article contributes to the ecological turn in the new economic planning literature by attending to new municipalist approaches to repairing metabolic rifts opened by capitalist urbanisation. It presents a qualitative study of the office of strategic planning for the Barcelona metropolitan region (PEMB) to examine how questions of social metabolism have informed its revaluation of planning, situating these changes within what we identify as an incipient ‘metabolic municipalism’. By examining how PEMB has redefined ‘the economic’ in economic planning, and how it has worked around the challenges of distributed planning without power, through public-community partnerships, we aim to illuminate and critically assess the elements of an ecological planning for metabolic sovereignty in conditions of planetary urbanisation.