 In fact, planners are a bit ambiguous. On the one hand, they promote growth because they think that's necessary in order to bring well-being to the people in the city, in order to pay for green space, for social housing, for hospitals, for public transport, et cetera, et cetera. So in fact, they try to bring this well-being via economic growth. So the essential assumption that we need to break is this, that we do need urban economic growth in order to generate well-being. And I think this is the radical mental shift that degrowth does and that we can bring in also in the planning sphere. We can organize urban space looking directly at well-being of people and the way they live without going through the economic growth. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Circular Metabolism Podcast, the bi-weekly meeting where we have in-depth discussions with researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to better understand the metabolism of our societies, or in other words, their resource use and pollution emissions, and how to reduce them in a systemic, socially just and context-specific way. I'm your host, Aristeed, from Metabolism of Cities, and today we'll talk about the intricate relationship between cities and growth, or economic growth. Indeed, during the last 50 years, cities were both the driver of and driven by neoliberal economy. Building malls, tunnels, parkings, flash condominiums, and other expensive landmarks created a new type of urbanism which embeds financial flows in the built environment. To date, it's hard to imagine a city that does not grow both spatially and financially. The spatial specialization of cities is now stripping them from space to satisfy their own needs in terms of nurturing, manufacturing, energy production, and many other vital needs. As such, this episode will try to understand how to break this reinforcing loop between cities and economic growth. To help us explore what would post-growth cities look like and how to implement them, I have the great pleasure to talk with Federico Savini, Federico is an associate professor in environmental planning, institutions, and politics at the University of Amsterdam, where we are right now. He combines approaches of political sociology, urban planning, and critical geography to study the pathways towards territories and a form of urbanization that thrives within the planetary boundaries. He has and will explore the de-growth perspective on spatial planning, especially in his European Research Council starting grant project, DeCycle, and he is also the co-editor of the book Post-Growth Planning, Cities Beyond the Market Economy. And we'll dive a bit deeper on this in a second. With all that being said, Federico, welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Oricio, thank you for having me here. I'm excited to have this discussion. There are many things that I want to talk with you. Before we get into the specifics of post-growth planning, post-growth cities, perhaps it might be interesting to share with the listeners and the watchers, how did you start linking these elements, first growth and planning and then post-growth and planning? What were some of the elements in your mind that told you, okay, that is something interesting, something that I didn't know and something that I want to spend more time on? Yeah. Thank you, Oricio, for the question. Yes, I actually somehow, four years ago, five years ago, I had this epiphany, I realized that planners were not really engaging with the de-growth or post-growth debate. And when I realized that, I was actually pretty frustrated and surprised because I was like, cities are essential for the economic growth of countries. That's where actually the economy gets pushed through investments, through human capital, through materials. So I thought it's actually paradoxical that if we talk about the post-growth future, planners are silent voices in this debate. Myself, in fact, I was also surprised of the fact that as an urban scholar more in general, somehow I was overly focusing on de-growth and post-growth solutions to the current climate and biodiversity crisis. But what I missed, in fact, was a bit of framework for planning space that would encompass more and more solutions, many of which we would not even know of the existence at the moment. In fact, for me the problem was that we were already talking about specific solutions rather than actually institutions and processes that would lead to a different form of urbanization. Just to give an example, we were all agreeing and discussing about cycling as a form of sustainable mobility or including urban agriculture in spaces that would allow it within cities or collaborative and cooperative forms of housing. These were all solutions available in the de-growth and post-growth literature somehow. But these were, in fact, already examples of what we can call prefigurative forms of post-growth living. What I felt we were lacking was a bit of a theory of planning that would allow this and many others solutions to emerge in cities, to give a bit more somehow the processes and the structural conditions that would favor these kinds of practices in cities. So that's why I started to think about, okay, what is the form of planning that allows these solutions and many more to happen? And then, of course, I engaged in a debate with many colleagues and we can, of course, explore more many of our, let's say, thought processes that lead to more or less an idea of a post-growth planning practice and theory. We will get back to this element of how post-growth was not available in planning. I had some personal experiences as well from that and I would like to see what you have in mind as well. I wanted before that to give everyone the same level of understanding. There is, of course, this element and you mentioned it, that cities are responsible for a majority of throughput of flows, be it financial or material, right? And this is not new, right? And from the 70s, the 80s, this was already known. What is it, the Moloch paper, which is city as an as an economic engine or I don't remember exactly that? Urban grow machine. Urban grow machine, exactly. David Harvey in the Anties, we're talking about the spatial fix, right? So it's not new, but can you perhaps paint some of these characteristics? Like why are cities so intricate with financial flows? What is their relationship and why is it this gross machine? Of course, in the late 70s, early 80s, in fact, works, especially in the United States and, of course, Western Europe, where the areas where this type of research was conducted, they understood that the older industrialized economy was changing into a post-industrial economy. This shift, which Harvey calls, defines as a capitalist switch somehow, was a shift from an economy that was governed by countries and nations, in fact, to one where countries and nations were not any more the first scales of governance. Cities were becoming more important. The reason is very simple, is that the product was not any more industrial manufacturing, but it was real estate. The money came from industrial manufacturing that was, at the time, in the 80s, relocated in other countries of the world. Those capitals had to find a new investment sector. And the real estate sector was actually that investment sector. In fact, in the late 80s, we talk about the post-industrial transition of cities, where, in fact, the redevelopment of industrial areas was the actual business, core business of urban governments. And, of course, real estate is still one of the top three commodities of contemporary capitalism. So, in fact, it was a grow machine because real estate would generate increasing returns on capital investments. And these returns were actually realized, in fact, within dense urban areas. Actually, the most dense areas of cities, where the so-called rent cap would be the highest and where, in fact, returns on investments would be the highest. Just to give you an example, the South Bank of London, the North Bank of Amsterdam, they are very close to city centers. And that's where, in fact, investments in real estate have huge returns. This economy was an urban economy, and it was becoming the driver of the actual national economy. So, cities became what others have called the national champions of the economy. At that time, in fact, national governments understood very well that in order to generate economic growth for countries was necessary to push urban economies to the fastest and to accelerate them. This was the strategy. And to do so, they not only, in fact, liberalized the market of housing in real estate, but also, let's say, created all kind of policy framework which would concentrate human and financial capital into cities. For example, the idea of the creative class, that was also the beginning of the 2000s. The creative class was a type of human capital that would generate innovation. And this human capital was particularly urban. I mean, as Richard Florida has described, would, in fact, appeal to urbanites. People would like dense urban environments with coffee shops and recreation activities. This was an urban form of investment in human capital. So, in fact, in those years, we see really a transition from a national to an urban form of capitalism. That's also why, in those same years, we start talking about planetary urbanization. Because this process made it clear that the whole material stock needed for that economy was basically coming from the so-called peripheries of the globe to the urban centers. This was a flow to the urban centers, which was unknown and unprecedented relative to the actual industrialized economy of the years before to come. Now, this is a story of the Western Europe, in particular, of course, Global North. This is where this idea was, first of all, prototyped. Now, of course, this process is questioned and reflected upon based on the new insights we have of urbanization in Global South, in China and India, in Africa. They are the stories slightly different, but also we see common patterns. That's why the urban grow machine is still today a very important and effective concept, I think, to critique planning. One last note, if it's possible, was that at that time the ecological question was not central. So, in fact, the urban grow machine was an urban economic grow machine. It was not what we could define today an urban machine of environmental destruction. So, that side came later, let's say, and it's something that now comes very central and very prominent in the way we deal with cities today. Yeah, and you mentioned it, the neoliberal part of it as well, how we're going to go back to it. But all of the policies that changed making zoning and housing policies, making this happen, right? I mean, it's not only an economic question, it kind of became contagious to all of the rest of the economy somehow. Sorry, all of the rest of the territory and the fabric of cities. So, yeah, I don't know if there are good traces about how this contamination went from the economy, making the city as the champion of the economy towards deregulating housing policies, zoning policies and all of that. Is this already quite well known? Of course, yes. As I said, real estate is one of the central commodities of contemporary capitalism. So, in fact, one of the ways to open the space to this urbanized capitalism was home ownership. This is one of the ways they did that. So, in fact, the neoliberalization of social housing, public housing stocks, public facilities, was a way to fuel an urban economy, because that's where the highest value of real estate was to be found, and also to fuel an urban economy based on debt. It was a very complex construction of financial tools, regulatory tools, and also cultural tools, symbolic tools. The idea was like, now is the time to, in fact, buy properties in cities. This is your insurance for life. The highest value property will remain high value. There will increase value in cities. This is your insurance. This is your pension. The same, of course, worked for individuals, then for real estate promoters and real estate investment trusts. This was the main commodity of investment. And to do so, what was essential is that the housing market would have been completely neoliberalized. The commodification of space includes, in fact, this process of allowing private enterprises to actually possess and buy almost every single facility and square meter in the city. Now, of course, there are different articulations of this neoliberalization. The neoliberalization of cities like London or New York is very different than that of cities like Amsterdam. So, we have many comparative studies that show there are different formats. So, it's very hard to talk about one unique pattern. But what we see is that the trend was liberalized properties, so make it private. That's essential to acquire debt. Acquisition of debt creates value for the future. With debt, you can leverage new debt, new investments. It's a process that allows the grow machine to function. It lubricates the grow machine. That's essential for that. The same works for urban land. We see government that started to, in fact, use urban land as an asset to get more investments and funding to invest in other activities. And of course, to keep this machine going, what was really essential is that attention and urban growth would never stop. So, that's why government started to invest in all kinds of things that we define commonly as place making or place marketing. So, attracting capital, human and financial capital to cities would allow the value of real estate to go up and up. And that's why it was essential for cities to compete with each other. Amsterdam started to compete with Barcelona, started to compete with Brazil. For human capital, for financial capital, this was essential to allow this value of land and real estate to go up. Also, another interesting thing that happened is that government started to reduce their role, of course, in direct investments on land, but focusing and started to focus their investment on specific facilities that would increase or bring increasing in value. For example, in Amsterdam, it's like the monopoly where you have, you know, the railroads and the things. You have investments, of course, in infrastructure, but not only infrastructure, of course, high-speed railways, airports, clearly, but actually also symbolic infrastructure. For example, in the year 2000 in Amsterdam, the government invested in museums, invested in tourism. They imported the I Love New York symbols in I Love Amsterdam, you know, or I Am Amsterdam. So this was a whole period in which cities became entrepreneurial. So that's what we call urban entrepreneurialism. It was essential to boost markets that were, at that time, being nearly liberalized in that sense, privatized. So in fact, this is a bit some of the traits or the key ingredients of the neoliberal governance of that time that allowed to make cities powerful markets in national economies. So I hope it explains a bit in a nutshell what you were asking. Yeah, yeah, of course. And I think there are two elements that are essential here, which is you mentioned them land and property. And of course, both have a specific role. Land as being, well, we try to optimize its value more and more. So we're going to build a residential, we're going to build offices. So therefore, we specialize in the space. Now it's just a nonproductive space that is here for financial reasons. And the second is, of course, property that locks or gives to everyone the space, right? There is this privatization of space and lands is completely different. I mean, it's completely enables or disables future possibilities, right? So how does this are these these two pieces of the puzzle that are really underlying these elements? Yes, yes, absolutely. In order to lubricate the urban grow machine is essential that land is commodifiable, which means there needs to be divided into relatively clear, you know, units which are usually overlapped with property rights, private property rights. Actually, the planning, this is one of the reasons why we talk I'm interested in post-growth planning is that planning is bounded historically, it's 100 years to the idea of zoning as a way to divide property. OK, in fact, zoning was invented in the beginning of the 20th century in the North America in order to guarantee property rights. That was the first reason. The second was also environmental, the management of environmental dangers in a situation of bad IG in due to industrialization, etc., etc. So the definition of land into different property rights and also the clear distinction between different types of land uses, residential, commercial, industrial, is essential to create this land market. If land is clearly identifiable into one use, you can put a price tag on it. If you know that that use will stay as such in a certain amount of years as an investor in land, you know what is the price variation in time. If you know who is the owner of a particular plot of land, you know who to buy it for from. This division of land is a completely artificial as it's clear, artificial way to separate land uses. I call it or we know it as a Euclidean. It's a very essential definition of land uses. It's based mostly on flat maps that do not consider too much the height or the underground. In fact, it's Euclidean and it is essential for the grow machine to function. This actually is a point in which the critique to planning also joins the critique of decroy economics, which also points at our Euclidean or Cartesian thinking of nature and non-nature of body and mind. This division's dualism that essentially allow our economy to survive. And to commodify nature and to commodify people and to commodify. The same process happens also on land. And this is also why, in fact, planners always talk about urban and rural, urban and natural as very distinctive features, which in fact do not interact so much. Also, it's the reason why common property rights have been progressively marginalized in planning. For many years, the idea was private and public property. This too, public property, in fact, is also a single subject property, the state or the government. So in both cases, we have single subjects. If you have common property rights, so cooperatives or other forms of in-between collaborative property systems, then the system of single property comes, let's say, does not work exactly anymore. You have to negotiate with ten tenants instead of one. It gets longer. It's a very different process. You put a grain of sand in the machine. Yes. Actually, what you say also, the fact that it gets slower and longer in the market, it's also another feature that makes common property rights somehow slowing down the grow machine. Exactly. So cooperative forms are not only very good for decommodifying real estate and land, but also are very good to slow down the process of urban transformation. Slowing down can be good, especially when fast transformation requires fast input of materials. Anyway, this is something maybe we will touch upon later. But yes, I try to kind of give an idea of how dividing land into different usages is essential for this land markets and to function. Yeah. Yeah. We touched upon it at the beginning. But of course, it's important to take the time now to discuss it. It's obvious for us, but perhaps let's remind it. There is we said that cities are essential for growth, economic growth. And on the on the in parallel, there has been a lot of literature that relates growth with economic ecological degradation, right? And therefore, cities are responsible for economic degradation. Are there some elements, important elements that you would like to add in this relationship between cities and ecological degradation that we might need to to underline before we go to degrowth, post growth and all of that? Yes, maybe I should make clear one thing. I'm not an anti urban person. It's actually interesting to see that there is a more and more evidences. In fact, it's quite a fact that compact living, so dense urban settlements are actually more sustainable than sprawl. So we do know that living together into a relatively small space allows us to have a variety of functions, which and at the same time, decreasing long, long distance mobility, which in fact would be an ideal setting for sustainability in that sense. Or whether or whether, of course, this whole story does not work if we take into consideration the opportunities and the easiness to actually, you know, flying and move far away and also the consumption, the individual consumption of people in cities. So I'm not having an anti density stance here. Cities are at the moment machines of environmental destruction because they are somehow planned in that way in a way in which transformation is fast. Transformation is driven by consumption and it's transformation that actually does not consider consider the impact of that transformation on other parts of the globe. However, it's not an anti density argument. So maybe we can explore that later, but the idea of living dense in particular urban settlement can be, in fact, one way to also deal with the climate and ecological, you know, destruction of the of the planet. So yes, of course, this is the a thousand points questions. This density, non density. What is the right scale? How big is too big and all of that? We'll come back to that in a second. So OK, so we know that cities are related to growth. Growth is harming or has ecological degree is making is degrading ecological features. And therefore, well, numerous scholars are urging us to go towards de-growth and post-growth, which are putting in check or material throughputs and therefore the financial throughput that are attached to it. However, there comes the interesting part and you mentioned it before. You said that, well, some of the de-growth and post-growth scholars were not explicit enough with the planning elements. And that's the impression I had. So a couple of weeks ago was the Beyond Growth Conference. And it was delightful. We heard fantastic speeches, but also policies about how to make these things happen. I think there was almost no presentation about the city or about a territory. The only one, perhaps, was Yorgo Scalis on Icaria Islands in Greece, about the lifestyle over there. And I think for me, coming from this field, like urban studies and all of this, I loved everything, but I felt a gap. And I think that's what we need to discuss. What are some of the high level post-growth de-growth principles that we can, first of all, let's enumerate some that are interesting? And how do they adapt or how do they translate in a city or territorial context, in your opinion? Yeah, I thank you for the question. I was also a bit frustrated, in fact, while I enjoyed it very much. Of course, of course. This is not a critique, but it's it's more I wanted more. I agree. Yeah, especially as an urban scholar, I do necessarily want more about cities. Yeah, this is a bit the intention, the job I have. I feel like I have me and other colleagues to bring this body of critique of capitalism, in fact, of a growth dependent economy into the city. And I think the job is not so difficult. In fact, there are many principles of de-growth and post-growth living that do do bring really social added value to the way people live in cities. In fact, ultimately, also planners themselves are extremely planners operating in a grower economy. They are extremely concerned with the well-being of people in the city. In fact, planners are a bit ambiguous. No, on the one end, they promote growth because they think that's necessary in order to bring well-being to the people in the city in order to pay for green space, for social housing, for hospitals, for public transport, et cetera, et cetera. So in fact, they try to bring this well-being via economic growth. So the essential, let's say the essential assumption that we need to break is this, that we do need economic, urban economic growth in order to generate well-being. And I think this is the radical mental shift that de-growth does and that we can bring in also in the planning sphere. We can organize urban space looking directly at well-being of people and the way they live without going through the economic growth. In fact... It's kind of trickle-down economic somehow. They want somehow from the economic growth that there is some well-being that trickle-down to the city. It's a trickle-down economics combined with, I would say, the trauma of shrinkage in the post-industrial era where cities were, in fact, declining. So if you take the traumatic experience plus the strength of the trickle-down economics, you get the strong convictions of planners that cities must bring jobs, houses, investments, financial transaction in order to bring well-being. Well, this is actually, in many cases, a waste of money and energy. If you want, I can give you an example. In Amsterdam, we have... In Amsterdam, as in many other European cities, we have an international financial business district. This is here called the South Axis. It's a very dense environment near a station in the south of Amsterdam between the center of Amsterdam and the airport. Key location where all the insurance, financial advisory companies, lawyers, all the infrastructure of the financial economy, the global financial economy is located. That's where they are located. This was a deliberate plan of the Amsterdam administration since the late 90s to bring that function there and to build a business district that would just help that economy. That business district is today still not livable for the people there. It's mostly office space. It goes down, yeah. In the night, absolutely. And also what we see is that there is continuous, every five years, continuous massive investments in order to make that space livable. So, in fact, at the moment, their plan is to invest four billion euros to put infrastructure underground, to build a park, to bring in housing of different types, et cetera, et cetera. There is a whole planning in order to make that space livable. But it was planned for an economy, in fact, that is completely, completely fictitious. In fact, the Netherlands is a fiscal paradise, we know it. Every year, there are 4,000 billion euros coming in the Netherlands and 4,000 coming out of the Netherlands. Of those transactions, just the minimum part, hands up, trickles down, in fact, to the space where people live. So, we built a whole infrastructure for a financial economy that, in fact, brings no value to the people living in that area. And it's becoming, indeed, a project that needs a lot of public investments to deliver quality. So, the question is, why do we do that in the first place? We could actually plan for an economy that brings value, social collective value, directly without going through these whole infrastructure investments that eventually don't turn out to be so positive for people living there. The same works with airports. I mean, 70% of the flights of Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam are exchange flights. There are more and more studies that show the added value of the airport economy around Schiphol is not as great as we expected. There are some basic assumptions in policymakers that need to be, in fact, debunked. So, to go back to your question, the essential shift, I think, is to think of cities as sites for well-being and figure planning as a direct concern towards well-being, rather than, you know, think it as a lubricant of the grow machine that eventually turns out into quality and well-being. I think that's what we should do if we take de-growth and post-growth seriously. You use that as well. I think in the book you call it decolonized imagination or something like that. Of the planner, yes. Yeah, exactly, to try to understand as well, as you say, to go directly towards the well-being and not somehow by having the global financial markets satisfied that we also get some piece of the pie in order to satisfy our green spaces or something like that. So, we're going to get to some initiatives, I think, later, be it cooperatives and others. I think there is also some other concepts that we could integrate in this discussion, which are, so if post-growth and de-growth are rather destination concepts or more visions, we also have some more operational concepts, which might be the circular economy. Some others might be, oh, I don't know if Donut Economics is a... Where do I situate it itself? But Amsterdam is very active in these concepts as well. The city itself is very proactively saying that it's going to achieve, I don't know how much percentage of circularity by 2050, is it 50 or 100, some ludicrous numbers. But how do you see these more operational concepts embed themselves into larger visions that are post-growth and de-growth? Yes, you're right. Amsterdam, for me, it's a perfect site to study this process. Actually, Amsterdam is usually one of the first in Europe to import different kinds of concepts like... In terms of branding, I have to admit that... They invest a lot in PR and these kind of things, yes. That allows me to study these developments right when they happen, so I am lucky in that sense. So, in fact, when we understand how these concepts that float in space, in the debate in Europe and beyond, lend to the city, we should go back to what I said before. The cities are the national champion of economy, it's where there is the dynamic, so it's actually pretty obvious that these economics concepts come to the city and get appropriated and used by urban policymakers. Nowadays, it's quite actually a standard process. There are scholarships, research, produces concepts, and then cities make something with them. Now, you mentioned two key concepts, the donut economics and the secret economy. Let's start with the donut because Amsterdam is quite known, in fact, for having worked with the donut economics framework by Kate Rohwerf. The donut economics framework is a post-bro framework. Obviously, it's a framework that questions the ecological ceiling of a particular economy, in this case the urban economy, and it also questions the foundation, the social foundation of this economy. So it's a post-bro concept because it says that we cannot grow, grow, grow, that would make the economy overshooting the ecological ceiling and brings back, of course, the idea that we need to focus on the well-being, on the essential needs of people in order to improve them. So it's obviously a post-bro concept. Now, when it gets applied to the city, this is a framework that very well allows to map overshooting and under-reaching. So the city of Amsterdam has many other cities working with Kate Rohwerf's agency, in fact, very well mapping where they're overshooting and where they're under-reaching. They show, for example, that in the last 10 years the economy was performing very well, but the personal life satisfaction of people was not. In fact, we had an increase in loneliness, we had an increase in mental issues, we had also an increase in community times. So we see that there was a decreasing of those elements of the foundation economy. So in fact, this donut allows very well to map this trend. However, what the donut does not do, and that's very important for a degrowth perspective, is that it does not tell governments, urban governments, where to reduce and where to increase. Or how, let's say, how to reduce and how to increase. It does not tell you you have to look, for example, at the harbor and at the fossil fuel that is stored there. Or it doesn't tell you, oh, you have to look at the airport and at the environmental impact of that facility. This is something that come up with a discussion around the donut, or at least it should. Now, from my perspective, this discussion, this big facilities, for example, that I just mentioned, were left out of the discussion around the donut strategy of the city of Amsterdam. So it's more of a diagnosis tool. Exactly. It is a diagnosis tool. The degrowth perspective is more than that. The degrowth perspective tells you need to reduce excess. To reduce excess, you need to look at where the wealth is concentrated, so where that excess is performed. You need to look and target those social groups that emit the most, those activities that emit the most, and do not bring social value. And you need to give back to those groups that don't meet basic standards. And to do that, you need to tax, you need to cap, you need to expropriate eventually. These are actually very delicate political issues that come up in the moment in which we take seriously the fact that we cannot overshoot ecological boundaries. So the donut is useful for that, but if the political debate and the way the debate is organized that does not address those issues, then it gets emptied of its radical values. And that's the risk. It's a bit of what scholars in urban geography call the post-political approach to these issues. You discuss about the donut, you find out what are the overshooting and under-reaching sectors, but eventually you don't bring up the key issue, the elephant in the room, which is accumulation of wealth, luxury consumption, private properties, et cetera, et cetera. Now, this is for the donut. You asked me about the circular economy. In fact, in Amsterdam the two come together. So for the small history, it was first the circular economy for a couple of years, five years or so, and two or three years later came the donut economy. The same thing happened in Brussels, so I have a very close affinity to what happened in Brussels. I followed it very much, so I'm curious to hear your story about the circular economy. Yeah, for the circular economy it happened the same. We had a concept that was coming from the European Union and from the national government in the Netherlands, in fact, that got urbanized. This happened in the mid-2000s, 2010, 12, 15 in Amsterdam in particular. What happened is that at one point the idea of circularity got contested. There were different factions using it. In fact, in the recent writing, I call it the good, the bad and the ugly of the circular economy, referring to the movie The Sergio Leone where we see three bandits trying to get to the gold and the gold is, in fact, secondary materials, a waste. That's what the circular economy needs to thrive, right? Needs some sort of obsolete product that can be repurposed, remanufactured, repaired. That's essential and that's why these three circular economies are somehow fighting with each other to get that material, that stuff. In the city, we see this happening very well. In the city, we have different flows of materials that can be valorized through circular economy policies. There is waste, of course. That waste at the moment goes mostly to the incinerator. The incinerator produces what they call green energy with it. It's a heat to, in fact, heat houses and disconnect them from natural gas, which is considered a fossil, of course, fuel. This is one way to think about circularity. Let's say the bad way to think about it. It's a way that valorizes waste but doesn't generate really high value and certainly does not reduce the cause of the problem, which is waste itself. We actually thrive out of it. But there's also other ways to think about the same. For example, we see many movements in the city, social movements that are claiming for appropriating the organic waste. Organic waste, which is an extremely valuable waste, ecologically and socially because it's around which you create food, which is essential for the well-being of people. In order to appropriate this organic waste, we need to divert it from this flow that brings it to the incinerator. Which makes the incinerator obsolete as well. Exactly. We see here a conflict over a resource, which is the waste produced by the city. This is a conflict that can be solved in two ways. On one end you can, of course, produce more waste and then everybody has a bit of it. That would be the paradox of the circular economy. We do not question wasteful consumption because waste is necessary for all the circularities to thrive. The other way would be to aggressively reduce waste and to tackle the source of it, which is urban consumption and production. That's the de-grow perspective. By tackling that side, we reduce it. But at the same time, we also divert into what I call the good circular economy, which is a social and ecological reuse of waste. And this is the case of the organic mass. But of course, we can think about the same when we take building and construction and demolition waste. The same when we talk about electronics, plastic, clothing. It's the same story. We see different circularity that play or conflict with each other in the city. It's extremely interesting to see, in fact. That's why I think there is a point at which the circular economy narrative or the circular metabolism narrative does coincide with the de-growth narrative. There is a point in which we see that the circular reuse of materials can be embedded in an economy that slows down, that downscales material flows, and that makes those material flows, in fact, functional to the social and ecological well-being of the people living in the city. It comes as a last element, right? First, you reduce, and then with what you reduce, you then only circularize. So, good, bad, what's the ugly? The ugly, in fact, was when I was doing research on this circular economy, these courses and infrastructures, I realized that there were large waste companies, which, in fact, are multinationals, like Suez, or Reneway, or Remondes. These were companies that, in fact, were developing infrastructures to deal with large amount of waste coming from the city, inspired by the idea of urban mining, right? What they were also doing is that they were not keeping this as their core business, like the incinerator with the heat, but they were embedding them in other functions, mostly related to water and energy. So, they were actually saying, okay, we are able to deal with very large masses of waste in a way that produces secondary materials that can be reused for economies that are actually urban, like, indeed, repurposing economy. Now, they're ugly, so they're not ideal, because they do thrive out of waste, of course. They do need that. On the other hand, I define them ugly and not bad, because they have an infrastructure that is becoming more and more local that can, in fact, deal with the current large waste streams produced by cities in a way that is more and more regional and not global, so they do not export. They try as much as possible to process them within the region, and also in a way that kind of speaks to new enterprises that are doing, in fact, quite interesting innovation with that waste. So, it is different, some sort of ambiguous form of circular economy. Now, of course, I'm not talking about profit, private property here, and labor rights, but we see that it's possible to regulate these functions in a way that workers' rights are matched. And if I can give one example. In the mid-2000s, we saw that in Amsterdam, electronic waste got regionalized. So, eventually, electronic waste was obviously one of the main exported type of waste with all kinds of consequences in terms of human rights and impact on land and ecology. What we see in the mid-2000s is that, in fact, companies affiliated with these organizations start to create electronic waste hubs around Amsterdam. At the moment, we have three of them. They do these hubs in a way that it's easier to pick up the waste from the consumers, bring them there, so short distance. In those hubs, they employ people with relatively fair and good conditions that allow them to disassemble these products and bring them back into production that is actually within the country at the moment. So, this was a localization of the waste stream of electronic waste, which, in fact, allowed to reuse, repurpose these kind of products, which, in fact, are extremely dangerous, extremely polluting. So, it's an ugly form because it thrives out of waste, but I would not define it as the evil, like the so-called vacuum cleaner, which is the instant rate, or things like this. I think it's very interesting that the last part you mentioned as well with how you call it, well, the regionalization of waste, we start thinking again in terms of land, right? Where are we going to put these infrastructure and what are they going to replace? And I think this might be a segue to this post-growth planner because the post-growth planner most certainly not only needs to reduce new constructions, new developments that are just there for a financial stake and not for well-being, but also that person needs to figure out what are the resources of a city? Land, of course. People, secondary resources in terms of materials and how to juggle with that, right? And I think, well, that's the biggest equation right now. It's to figure out once you have a hectare of space, what do you do with it today in a city? Do you grow vegetables? Do you put a circular economy activity? Do you keep it for later? Do you put trees for carbon or green space? And these are things that I don't have an answer for. I don't know if you have an answer for it and how do you feel this post-growth planner fit into these questions? Yeah, thank you. It's difficult to decide what to do on each square meter of land, but at least what we can say is that it should not be a pure private property choice, so at least we have public debate on what to do on land. That would be the main condition in a democratic process to decide what to do on that land. That would be the main condition for a post-growth planning practice. Now, it is essential to envision a post-growth city and it's really difficult. We do not have yet a vision of how a post-growth organization would work. However, the post-growth digro literature gives us many good indications. And one of the indications I think that I take on board when I work on this is the idea of autonomy. Now, autonomy is mostly understood in terms of political autonomy but also autonomy from the ideology of growth. So it's a sociocultural process as well. Now, why not? And I think we should also understand that idea of autonomy in terms of biophysical and infrastructural terms. So at the moment, cities, because they were the urban growth machines, became not autonomous at all. We do not produce anything that the city needs within the boundaries of the city or when I talk about cities, I talk about regions. Not even labor, actually. In fact, cities are the least autonomous entities we can imagine within an economy. If a global value chain breaks for any reason, cities will suffer. It's an extremely dangerous situation, of course. If the economy collapses, there will be a huge concentration of drama within the city. And that's why shrinkage is this traumatic experience. So cities are not autonomous and that's essential. And if they're not biophysically autonomous, they're also not politically autonomous. All the big decisions that impact on cities are taking somewhere else at the European level, international level. In fact, all decisions about the financial economy, about the commodities economy are taking somewhere else, not within cities. In fact, mayors are pretty powerless in relative to those decisions. So I think one of the main indications of the degrowth of scholarship for planners is autonomy in terms of biophysical and political terms. Now, fortunately, there is a lot of literature and research in urban planning, historically, that have dealt with this issue. Already the idea of the Garden City, of beneath an hour at the beginning of the 20th century, was thinking in terms of a polycentric system of urban settlements, which would have cooperation linkages. So connect to each other in order to exchange fundamental resources, but also be autonomous and surrounded by natural and rural areas. There was already one vision of an autonomous region. Then we had also the whole idea of a bioregion that is still very popular today, where we think about systems of human settlements embedded in a very peculiar and particular ecosystem landscapes. And these settlements thrive out of a specific peculiarity of this landscape. This bioregional concept is very useful for planners because it tells something very simple. It says, in order to think about the thriving economy for the city, you need to look at what is the ecosystem around the city? What does produces? What is the particular properties? So this is already another avenue of thinking. But in general, I think the autonomy, the idea of autonomy can be very useful for imagining an urban post-growth future. Also, I'd like very much to refer to the idea of the bioregion as developed by Bookchin, so the most anarchic perspective on it. There we see an idea of urbanization that is very based on settlements that are governed as much as possible democratically and that cooperate into some sort of federations where they exchange resources. Now, this system is in place, we see them happening, in fact, within the cracks of the grow urban economy, we see that happening. For example, as an example of this federation of relatively autonomous governing bodies, I always use the Mitz-Oysers in the cut in Germany. It's an organization, it's a federation of housing cooperatives in Germany that basically organize and coordinate housing cooperatives over the entire country. It's a cooperative, therefore it's owned by the members. This cooperative owns half of the cooperatives of each real estate in the country and this allows them to transfer knowledge to help each other and also avoid that those cooperative housing gets indeed privatized and financialized. By region, it's a federation because it is built from the bottom up and it is very much polycentric because it reunites different housing cooperatives along the country. Now, another example is the community-supported agriculture system. There are many networks of community-supported agriculture within regions that coordinate with each other in order to, of course, cater for their need of logistics. For example, they are also built from the bottom up. They are grass roots rooted, in fact, and they do organize, in this case, food supply in a way that cutters for demand off the place, first of all. Now, these are not urban complex entities as such, but they give us an indication of how autonomy would work in an urban environment. Now, in order for that autonomy to work, we need, of course, to slow down the metabolism of the city. Consume less, of course. We need to downscale it. Sorry, consume slower and consume less. We need to make it last longer and be thinner the metabolism of the city. And, of course, we can, of course, close also the metabolism of the city. These are essential terms that allow us to understand how these autonomous cities would work. And, well, of course, this idea of commons and this idea of cooperatives, can you see it be translated to all the essential functions of a city, so mobility, food, housing, education, and all that? Would that be kind of a bottom-up interlinkage of cooperatives that intermingle at different spatial scales? So that is a bit how we could operationalize it. Yeah, the question of how to articulate this urban services within the state, in fact, it's crucial. Now, I always imagine it more like a public, common form of partnership. So you have essential framework rules that are enforced and set in place by public authorities, governments, that allow, for example, to guarantee a certain amount of social housing everywhere, a certain amount of public space everywhere, but also organize a system of public health and transportation. This is functions that the public can fulfill because they are essential functions and should not be for profit. Water services, water infrastructure, another example where the public ownership of this infrastructure is crucial. However, this infrastructure cannot work properly if it's not connected to an infrastructure of, in fact, collaborative and cooperative forms of management and property of other functions. So we imagine a system with different layers and it's essential in order to reach services and provide services of the best quality right there where they are needed. And when we see how the state behaved in the past, we know also that sometimes has shortcomings by delivering services that are directly benefiting the users. In this sense, cooperatives are much more effective. The case of housing is probably the most easy to explain. In housing, ideally, we will have public housing that deliver housing to those that really don't have the means to access cooperatives, for example, but also we have a system of housing cooperatives that work together in synergy that it's basically providing housing to dwellers that own at the same time their own property. Housing cooperatives are essential, why? Because they are very good in avoiding the commodification of the housing stock, especially if there are limited equity cooperatives or no equity cooperatives and they are very well, if they are democratically organized, they work very well to avoid that housing units gets privatized and eventually fall in the private market. While we know that public housing has been progressively also privatized. So in fact, public housing in that sense needs to be protected so against neoliberalization derivatives, of course, side trends and the cooperative sector needs to be nurtured in order to offer that type of housing that is suitable customized managed by the people living in them. So this is how we can envision, I think, let's say, a state that is somehow organized around public common interest. And cities today, many cities of Europe offer many examples of how this can be done. For example, the common use regulations in Naples is another example where the government assigned the right to management to collectives of non-residential estates, in this case cultural estates. We have here in Amsterdam the so-called free space tool which allows government to give use of land, public land to collectives and allows them to be there and fulfill their social and cultural and political functions. So there are all different kind of models in cities that we see work in that direction as a public common partnership. Before we go back to the planning element, there is... It's an element I haven't managed to figure out. So of course we need to reduce, right? This is a given, we need to slow, we need to reduce. That's a given. Now, what happens when... How do you deal with flows of people? Meaning right now, cities because their economic growth machines attract people to fulfill this and to operate this machine, right? Do you think in the future because this will not be its primary role there won't be a certain influx? We talked about commuting as well before. Will it be more balanced? I'm asking this because there is always this bad comparison or this bad element where people say, well, we need housing, right? This nobody can disagree with, right? Of course we need more schools, we need more housing, we need more quality housing. But as you mentioned, this is also post-political. What type of housing? And for who and how? And so it's a bit hard to answer this question about will a city stop to grow physically? Do we need to put a tentative border or not? What happens there? I have difficulties to imagine it and I think this goes back to your bioregional concept and all of this, how polycentric it is, how not. But do you have any reflections on this? Yes, it's a very complex question. I mean, we don't know also how the future will look like. Of course, yeah. We don't have a blueprint and we should not but what I want to make clear is that the growth we're talking about is not the growth in people. So it's the growth in financial economic transactions, any material transactions. So in fact, we are not talking about cities that stop welcoming people. Quite the contrary. In fact, if we arrive to a form of urban living that is not centered around consumption, then we can, and increasing production, then we can imagine a very dense urban environment that has a low ecological footprint. So density per se, in fact, is not good or bad. It's really about what type of consumption pattern and what type of productions that density produces. So I believe, of course, that the mega cities are some sort of today on the one end, monstrous on the one end fascinating form of urbanization that is specifically reflecting the growth economy. They are mega cities because they bring labor to high concentration in order to maximize, in fact, the production and consumption of goods and services. They are not mega cities because people decided all of a sudden to go and live all close together in 20, 30 million people together. So the mega cities, as we know it, it's a product of the urbanized growth economy. What we do, however, know is that there are some regional systems that include millions of people that have reached higher degrees of livability and try constantly to reduce the ecological footprint. And to do that, they indeed concentrate on polycentric settlements, so smaller centers that are connected by public transportation and that are surrounded, in fact, by land that is productive for the well-being of those people living there and that, to a certain degree, reduce unnecessary forms of consumption. This is a system that would, I think, be closer to an idea of a post-growth city. It's a system that, if it's well organized, I think can host an increase in urban population. Let's continue on this thought. So is this for existing or what do you do with current mega cities? Let's imagine we go to this post-growth, but what do we do with the current urbanites and the current mega cities? Do we redistribute them to these new poles? Will that consume more materials? It's kind of a never-ending question. I'm asking this because I know it's impossible to have an answer, but you have thought of this and I'm curious to... First of all, what we could do, we could downscale all the functions that are ecologically destructive and do not bring well-being for society. If we do that, we free up an incredible amount of space within the city. I'm talking about fossil fuel storage, chemical companies, airports, landing zone for airports, highways, many business districts for the financial economy, of course, retail areas, commercial centers and, of course, intensive agriculture or intensive... So these kind of functions can be downscaled. If we downscale those functions, then we don't have scarcity of space. I mean, we will have actually an abundance of space where we can do many other things. We can, in fact, provide essential services that are needed. Housing, first of all. Gardens, yes, of course. Other facilities, healthcare, schools, cultural centers, universities. So these are areas that would be available for new types of development. It's what we can call as a reconversion or retrofitting. We do that all the time as planners. Actually, maybe you may not be aware, but nowadays there is a proposal by the European Union to actually have a no-net land-take framework, which would allow basically... It would be a quite important tool to say, to see this, whatever you do, you cannot expand. You cannot cover soil. You need to re-convert soil that you don't use anymore in order to have more available space for your new developments. But I think this is an interesting development which promotes the reconversion. We need to basically divest from the fossil infrastructure and use that infrastructure for a well-being. And there are examples in cities that have been doing so, like in Valencia, there was this ring road that was reconverted in a huge linear park. We have in Amsterdam policies of auto-low policy, a small-scale policy relative to the big fossil infrastructure, but it shows that we can reduce car space and give it back to other functions. These are just the type of low-hanging fruit of this reconversion of space. I think if we instigate this process, we will already be a step further in dealing with the so-called overpopulation. Of course, these divestments will be also functional to reduce the source of environmental destruction, which in turn, hopefully, will be also able to reduce the mass climate migration that we have today due to the inhabitability of major parts of the world. This is part of this project, I would say, or this vision. On the other hand, again, bringing quality functions in the smaller towns and centres will also allow to block this migration of human capitals or brain drain that we have constantly from small centres to the bigger cities. This is also a planning question, not urban planning, but actually, a national spatial planning question to allow for a minimum basic standard of essential urban services in all towns existing today. In fact, we could say if degrowth is for universal basic income and for universal basic services, we can say that degrowth planning is for universal urban basic services. Housing, public transportation, green space, biodiversity, and of course, air quality, etc. This is a way we could also indeed improve the conditions in those areas that today are in fact shrinking and losing the competition against the bigger city centres. We now have an idea of what is this role of the post-growth planning and the post-growth planner as well, which seems to always, well, planners and architects seem to have an impossible choice to make. As you mentioned before, they're quite schizophrenic, they need to somehow fit all of the needs and all of the constraints with maintaining economic growth. I'm curious, yeah, you had an entire chapter over here about what is the role of this post-growth planner for the future, and you also had the manifesto of post-growth. I don't know if you want to touch upon these elements. Yeah, I think in the last part of the book, in fact, we asked ourselves, me and my colleagues, planners are, in many cases, people that really want the wellbeing of the inhabitants of their cities and the cities where they work, and we were asking ourselves, why don't they embrace more this post-growth of the growth ideals? So we decided to ask them what they think about it, and what we found out, in fact, in particular a colleague of mine from growing University, Christian Lanker, what they found out is that many planners do have post-growth ideals as their principles and ethical principles in their practice, but they find it very hard to break down this machine attitude and actually overcome this trauma or shrinkage. However, I think there are the seeds of change there, because cities are the places where you see very clearly the effect of economic growth on the wellbeing of people. You see very clearly evictions, you see very clearly people cannot afford housing, you see very clearly the stress related to commuting, to car mobility and highways, so you see this very clearly. Of course, the job of the planner is also to be very clear, not the one of deciding top-down what a big-growth city should be. That would be a misunderstanding. The role of a post-growth planner is to embrace diversity, to include as much as possible a different marginalized group of the policy process to take their input seriously, to enable this democratic process of decision-making and to, in fact, spatially organize the type of input that is being given or advised that. And also to, in fact, give the space to collectives and cooperatives to, in fact, develop their own system of living convivially and sufficiently. That's the role of a post-growth planner. We are not thinking in terms of, you know, a planner like a technocrat of the growth that would be completely against the principle. But this is in line with what the growth literature and scholarship and practices already showed. If you ask people what they want for their wellbeing, they will not tell you, they want a new airport, but I will tell you I want a school for my kids, I want green space. So it's actually a process that it's quite, it would come quite, I would say, naturally if we would take post-growth principles seriously. And in the manifesto in the book, we just try to list ten of these principles that can be taken as a guideline for planners and both professional and non-professional planners. People deal with spatial change and spatial usage in their daily work. Before we end, I want to do an exercise with you. Let's say that we have the task of making Amsterdam post-growth. What are the steps? Where do we start with? What are some intermediary steps and how do we then realise that finally Amsterdam is post-growth? Thank you for this question. Actually, I had just two weeks ago a meeting with many architects and designers from the municipality asking the same question. How do we do it? Obviously, I don't have a clear answer. You don't have it? No, but we can start, as I said, from few steps. Actually, the city of Amsterdam already said, okay, we're taking the doughnut as a way to map our overshoot and our underreach. Okay, let's take that seriously and do, first of all, a survey of where are these areas of underreach and what are the sectors at the most dangerous? But at the same time also, which are the functions that are the most ecologically destructive and the ones that do not bring direct well-being to the inhabitants of the city? So that's the first step and that can be done already. How do you manage to make this link because it's a complicated link to figure out? I think we should start with questioning the major infrastructures of the city and to read carefully the studies that have been produced that show that the actual social value of those infrastructure is not so great, neither in terms of, indeed, social value for the collectivity of the people in the city, nor in terms of jobs, in terms of quantity of jobs. We need to question the financial economy, the financial district of the city and the same works with retail. We know that there are some retail areas that don't perform as it was hoped. So this survey, survey before plan, it was a bit of the slogan of the modernist planning, but this survey can be done, but it's a survey that can be done also by asking urban inhabitants what are the functions that they value the most. And in the book, in fact, there is a chapter where people asked during the COVID pandemic what made their living better during the lockdown. This is the first basic step. The other basic step, I think, is to identify areas of downscaling. So key sites where we really need to retrofit a complete downscale infrastructure. So it's kind of phasing out for social infrastructure. Yeah, absolutely. Then we need to work hard on the property system of the most essential commodity of cities, housing. There we need to tackle real estate investment trust that have multiple houses in property and that lead eventually to speculative markets and therefore unaffordable prices. We need to deal with that property system in order to, in fact, give back to public housing, which is now suffering and needs to be re-energized dramatically. That's not clearly a material de-growth side, but it's a political important, very, very important step to take. And this you confiscate? I think this is we should bring all the options in the table and the political discussion and not avoid post-political consensus-building processes and politicize housing property and if we do that seriously we can do, for example, what Berlin did to talk about what is excessive home ownership. They identified companies with more than 3,000 houses as excessive, we can do the same in Amsterdam. We can think about that. But we can also and this is already happening, we can use those tools that allows to slow down the housing market and to bring it back to the real need of real urgency of housing affordability and, for example, anti-speculation rulings like you cannot buy a property if you don't live in it at least for 5, 10 years. This is one way to do that. The other is give land to cooperatives and tools and subsidies to them which they are obviously not speculative forms of home ownership. This is another rule. The other is regulating private rent in a way that makes it less difficult to buy it for investments and easier to rent it stably for affordable price. These are all in fact all planning norms, regulations that we have already and we can use systematically to move to a city that is oriented towards well-being. In fact, to summarize, there are policies for reduction divestment phasing out and there are policies for improvement increase, in fact, of those facilities, basic services that are needed for the well-being of the cities. There's two types of movement that's I think essential in the de-growth framework de-growth vision to take into consideration. I can go on and on but I think all of this would be possible in fact if we have a system of democratic decision making that is diffused and rooted in the city not top-down but that respects different neighborhoods, their identity, their physical, historical identity that respect the inhabitants of these neighborhoods includes them in a way that is accessible. This is a form of decentralized planning that I think would be important to set up for a post-growth city. Let's see if Amsterdam will also champion this marketing endeavor of post-growth or not. Any last topics we haven't covered? Oh, difficult question. No, I think we addressed many. I'm very happy of this conversation, I have to say. I enjoy it very much. Any books? Of course there is this collective book of post-growth planning. I see here that turning up the heat from Maria Kaika and colleagues as well. Is there any articles, books or movies that discuss either the city and the growth machine, either originaries of post-growth or something completely different that you would like to inspire us with? There are many books and I would say there are many, many books also older books about planning that could represent a bit of post-growth idea. Rather than giving one or two titles I think what I'm doing now and this will come soon public in a month or two I am building a repository of all works on urban degrowth out there together with colleagues and this will be online and probably this is the first time I say it in public will be the post-growth city coalition and it's in progress and I'm going to bring together all this works about cities and degrowth in order to also give visibility to this stream of thoughts that is actually out there but sometimes it doesn't get visible enough. So yeah, that's what I'm trying to do now the challenge but yeah, I would be already very happy if people start thinking in terms of urban degrowth in a way to fill this gap that I think it's there in the degrowth debate. I mean I'm very excited about this future. I think it's getting there. There is signs, there is early warning signals that we have infiltrated the minds and the souls of some people to finish you also have a blog and you share recipes as well in your blog. Would you like to share a recipe with us? Yes, I don't remember the last one. I have to say the blog is taken care by me and my partner Miriam Meisner also a degrowth scholar and since we joined the movements like since Rebellion, Scientist Rebellion at one point we were a bit frustrated because we needed an outlet for the most explicit arguments about I think ecological and climate justice. So we decided to open this blog. The title is The Planet Amateurs and the idea is that there is no expert on saving the planet. We are all amateurs also scholars and we learn together and there we share every single thing that we feel like sharing including recipes rigorously vegan recipes. But I invite the listeners to have a look at the blog It's planetamateur.com Planetamateur.com Thank you for mentioning it In fact I always forget it's a way for us to indeed share our thoughts And I will try some of your recipes I think one was on pasta with Brussels sprouts or something like that Very easy to do Everything is very easy to do there Well thanks so much Federico for this wonderful discussion Thanks as well to you all for listening joining Don't hesitate to let us know what you have thought of this Are you a planner? Are you a practitioner? Are you a scholar? In these topics let us know where you are situated in this I think the discussion is necessary We are still at the very beginning of these reflections And there are other episodes in the podcast that you might enjoy If you will enjoy this one Here Eric Swigendau of course on Urban Political Ecology We talked about Donut Economics The one with Kate Railworth There is much more after that if you are interested Once again, thank you Federico Thanks as well everyone and I'll see you all in two weeks