HOME / PROJECTS /

Contest and Negotiation Over Urban Futures: An Experiment

Alt Text: Graffiti on a wall saying "The Only Sustainable Growth is Degrowth."
Attribution: Paul Sableman, CC 2.0, Wikimedia Commons

This grant funds the first phase of a long-term collaboration across the Law School and Graduate School of Design.  The project’s goal is to open up robust and grounded debate about transition pathways toward alternate urban-regional configurations that more adequately respond to urgent environmental and social challenges; with such challenges implicating ideas of growth, resource use, autonomy, and relations of scale.  Such challenges might include any of a range of intractable global issues, such as climate change, cross-national migration, sheltering rapidly growing populations in contexts of great inequality, environmental effects of resource and energy extraction, and the like.  The project seeks to mobilize critical simulation and negotiation exercises designed to elicit both distributional conflict and interest-based bargaining among its participants.  Both the scripting of simulations and the facilitation of subsequent debate will be informed by critically and politically valenced transition discourses such as de-growth and post-development.  Thus, through the project’s innovative methodology of focused simulation, it will open up new vectors of normative and pragmatic deliberation about plausible pathways of design, as well as politics, in an era of grand and sustained challenges for urban and regional contexts.  This first round of funding for will support a team of doctoral students in law and design to do preliminary research on simulation design.

Researcher: Lucie White and Samuel Tabory

Keywords: Degrowth, Transitions, Scenarios

Project Documentation

This report shares the advances of the Negotiated Futures Degrowth Scenario Development Work supported by funding from the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative in the Spring and Summer of 2022. The grant has funded two deliverables: (1) a literature review and (2) the outline for a proposed joint article.

OVERVIEW:

Based on the initial proposal for this project, the goal was to lay theoretical and pragmatic groundwork for developing a template to be used in a longer-term project in which academics, and ultimately also community members, would come together in interdisciplinary groups that would use the scenarios to develop “scenarios”. Using the scenarios as their “prompt”, each group would negotiate plausible pathways toward contrasting urban futures. To meet the project’s theoretical goals, each scenario would be designed to “make real” key, and often conflicting, principles of various “transitions discourses” such as post-development and degrowth, all of which invoke environmental and civilizational crises to call for new understandings and socio-material configurations around growth, resource use, autonomy, and relations of scale. 

Mellon funding permitted a team led by Urban Planning PhD student Samuel Tabory, and five additional doctoral students from Harvard Law School and the Graduate School of Design, to work together under the supervision of Harvard Law School Professor Lucie White over the course of four months. Through bi-weekly meetings the group collaborated in designing, conducting, and analyzing a structured in-depth literature review of key bodies of domain-specific work related to the logics and dynamics of “degrowth”.  Their work ranged over multiple geographies, scales, technologies, academic disciplines, and more.  Added together, the literature review offers an in-depth understanding of “degrowth logics” and dynamics in key sectoral domains relevant to the organization of a generalized urban-regional social unit.  These five domains include: 1) housing and food, 2) transportation and connectivity, 3) livelihoods and jobs, 4) health and education, and 5) migration and trade.

The literature review, as compiled in a digital format, will lay invaluable groundwork for the systematic development of scenarios with accompanying guides, as described briefly above.  These resources might be used both in the group interactions referenced above and in a range of other contexts, all which might encourage debate about the tradeoffs and tensions associated with configuring urban-regional social, material, and/or legal systems this way or that way under conditions of degrowth pressure.

The proposed article will outline the tensions and logics mapped across key domains, consider their implications at the urban regional scale, and connect them to key institutional and legal considerations. 

THE LITERATURE REVIEW — A focus on tensions and logics:

The major analytical frame that guided the joint literature review was an interest in understanding opposing tensions or logics with understanding approaches to (re)arranging systems (be they social, material, or legal systems) when thinking about how urban-regional life and institutions might be reconfigured to respond to severe degrowth pressures. For each of the five domains, the team considered: 

  • What do “degrowth,” “post-development,” and “green new deal” literatures say about different approaches to configuring that domain?
  • What are points of divergence or tension in those approaches, key opposing principles? 
  • What institutions/ legal regimes/ background norms/ actors are (implicitly or explicitly) implicated by those approaches?

Isolating and distilling a list of common tensions and logics across domains was the main intellectual result of the cross-domain literature review. The tensions and logics, presented in consolidated form here, constitute major dilemmas that would need to be addressed and engaged with in any scenario “debate” about advocating for a position to configure systems in a future urban-regional world this way rather than that way under conditions of degrowth pressure. The purpose of focusing on the isolation and distillation of core tensions and logics is to ensure that theoretically, the group has identified critical decision and/or conflict points (around tensions and logics) in urban regional “system design” that opposing scenario contexts and scenario guides would need to explicitly draw out to be able to frame constructive debate about the various opposing directions that any such decision might take. The joint work to explore and synthesize an understanding of cross-domain logics and tensions, via the literature review results, provides the theoretical backbone for thinking about the rigorous design of specific scenario contexts and guides that will constitute the next phase of work for this project which the team will continue pursuing after this period of Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative Funding. 

Preliminary Scenario Assumptions:

While the mapped tensions and logics (listed below) will form the basis of a much more detailed scenario design, key tentative scenario assumptions were mobilized from the outset to help guide and concretize the research team’s collective thinking and analysis. Four major assumptions were elaborated about the type of scenario context that might be imagined.  

  1. Assume a global north/western urban region (in terms of institutions and resources);
  2. Assume major migration influx (both domestic and international, in the magnitude of hundreds of thousands) due to worldwide climate shock wherein no metropolitan area is not impacted by this unprecedented influx (no opt out/non substitutability);
  3. Assume a political context globally where northern/western countries are under an extreme degrowth mandate, specifically that GDP cannot increase due to ongoing impossibility of material-economic decoupling (assume that regardless of whether it is technically possible, it is proving not to actually happen, and thus the degrowth mandate is viewed a last resort option);
  4. Assume additional material resource flow limits and caps on top of GDP cap.

The relevance and utility (for the purposes of stimulating generative theoretical dilemmas) of each of these assumptions, evolved over the course of the research effort. The eventual detailed scenarios will deviate from at least some of these assumptions, as well as mobilizing many additional assumptions not elaborated here. We present these initial broad scenario parameters for contextual purposes, illustrating the starting point from which we began the joint research effort. 

Putting them together in Potential System Configurations — This Way or That Way? 

  • Rationing/allocation/sufficiency logics (how to ration or determine sufficiency, by what criteria)
    • Are these inherently subjective measures? How do you decide someone else has enough?
    • How do you account for matters of taste and preference re quality of life, re the good life?
  • Benefit-intensity vs. resource-intensity (how much does something need to improve quality of life to justify its resource intensity; what is an acceptable ration of benefit intensity to resource intensity; there are lots of marginal improvements that probably aren’t justifiable in terms of resources required to be achieve)
    • Trying to creatively solve at the cutting edge vs. just invest in the basics of what we know works
    • Technology and research questions 
  • Intensification vs. de-intensification (do we do more now to do less later; do we do more in some places to do less in others)
  • Boundary and criteria question regarding making calculations about when and where “more” or “less” should happen 
  • State resources vs. private resources
  • Expert vs. citizen control 
  • Personal security of position vs. collective security of position (stiving to own your home vs. striving to have a socially guaranteed right to housing)
  • Service/duty/obligation vs. choice 
  • Coercion vs. voluntarism 
  • Permission/planning/control vs. choice  
  • Coercion vs. voluntarism
  • Tendency toward universalization (everyone is the same) vs. balkanization (every community is different)
  • Formal/legal sanction vs. informal/social sanction (for imposing social norms, responding to harms, etc.)
  • More mobility, exchange, and permeability vs. Less mobility, exchange, and permeability 

THE JOURNAL ABSTRACT—

Grappling with Degrowth at Scale: Mapping Socio-Material-Legal Tensions

Samuel Tabory1, Samuel Bookman2, Angel Cabrera Silva2, Rose Karoro2, Guy Priver2, Ziwei Zhang1 and Lucie White2*

*Corresponding Author

  1. Harvard Graduate School of Design, Cambridge, USA
  2. Harvard Law School, Cambridge, USA

This paper explores what it means to engage with core tenets of degrowth logics and tensions when extended to the urban-regional scale. What would happen to life and institutions in major urban-regional areas if infinite macro-economic growth in gross domestic product, were, for whatever reason, no longer possible? We ask this question not out of any normative commitment to degrowth futures per se, but out of a concern for the lack of grounded discussion of what possible degrowth futures (imposed, voluntarily chosen, or otherwise) might mean, in grounded terms, for a range of largely taken-for-granted socio-material-legal configurations that generally assume (implicitly or explicitly) the possibility of infinite growth. The paper presents the results of a structured literature across domain-specific literatures that seek to specifically reveal tensions and contradiction, as well as possible synergies, embedded in degrowth logics within and across the considered domains and their scalar dynamics. The five thematic domains that the author team constructed for the review and engaged are: 1) housing and food, 2) transportation and connectivity, 3) livelihoods and jobs, 4) health and education, and 5) migration and trade. Coming from planning and law, the authors pay particular attention to the relevant institutional, political, and legal dynamics of degrowth futures as they interact with questions of materiality and scale. The paper does not answer the initial animating question noted above, but it does start to provide a conceptual and synthetic map of the core dilemmas and tensions that are unresolved or unaddressed in existing literature when one poses such a question, responding in part to concerns that key degrowth logics have not yet been specifically spatialized nor brought down to ground level in recognizable socio-material-legal institutional terms. 

APPENDIX- Bibliography of Sources Reviewed  

  • Aillon, J.L. & G. D’Alisa. (2020). “Our Affluence is Killing Us: What Degrowth Offers Health and Well-Being.” In K. Zywert and S. Quilley (eds.) Health in the Anthropocene: Living Well on A Finite Planet. University of Toronto Press. 
  • Aldridge, T.J., Patterson, A., Tooke, J. (2003). “Trading places: geography and the role of local exchange trading schemes in local sustainable development.” In S. Buckingham and K. Theobald (Eds.), Local Environmental Sustainability. Woodhead. 
  • Ardal, C. & J.A. Rottingen. (2012). “Open Source Drug Discovery In Practice: A Case Study.” PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, 6(9). 
  • Barca, S. (2019). “An Alternative Worth Fighting For: Degrowth and the Liberation of Work.” In E. Chertkovskaya, A. Paulsson., & S. Barca (eds.) Towards a Political Economy of Degrowth. Rowman and Littlefield. 
  • Bednarz, D. & A. Beavis. (2012). “Neoliberalism, Degrowth and the Fate of Health System.” HealthAfterOil.wordpress. [Blog Post]. https://healthafteroil.wordpress.com/2012/09/14/neoliberalism-degrowth-and-the-fate-of-health-systems/#_edn17. 
  • Bendix, D., Muller, F. & A. Ziai. (2019). “Postdevelopment Alternatives in the North.” In E. Klein and C.E. Morreo (eds.) Postdevelopment in Practice: Alternatives, Economies, Ontologies. Routledge. 
  • Brenner, N., Marcuse, P., & M. Mayer (eds.) (2012). Cities for People, Not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City. Routledge. 
  • Bollier, D. & S. Helfrich. (2019). Free, Fair, and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons. New Society Publishers.
  • Borowy, I. (2013). “Global Health and Development: Conceptualizing Health between Economic Growth and Environmental Sustainability.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 68(3). 
  • Borowy, I. & J.L. Aillon. (2017). “Sustainable Health and Degrowth : Health, Health Care and Society Beyond the Growth Paradigm.” Social Theory & Health, 15(3). 
  • Buch-Hansen, Hubert (2014). “Capitalist Diversity and De-growth Trajectories to Steady-State Economies,” Ecological Economics, 106. 
  • Buchs, M. & M. Koch. (2019). “Challenges for the degrowth transition: The debate about wellbeing.” Futures, 105(2019), 155-165.
  • Cassidy, J. (2020). “Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?” The New Yorker, February 3, 2020.
  • Chertkovskaya, E., Paulsson., A., & S. Barca (eds.) (2019). Towards a Political Economy of Degrowth. Rowman and Littlefield.
  • Chiengkul, P. (2018). “The Degrowth Movement: Alternative Economic Practices and Relevance to Developing Countries.” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 43(2), 81-95. 
  • Chowdhury, S. (2007). Everyday Economic Practices: The Hidden Transcripts of Egyptian Voices. Routledge. 
  • Cucca, R. & M. Friesenecker. (2022). “Potential and limitations of innovative housing solutions in planning for degrowth: the case of Vienna.” Local Environment, 27(2), 502-516. 
  • Daly, H. (2015). “Contribution to GTI Roundtable ‘On Degrowth’.” The Great Transition Initiative, February 2015. https://www.greattransition.org/commentary/herman-daly-the-degrowth-alternative-giorgos-kallis. 
  • Demaria, F., Schneider, F., Sekulova, F., & J. Martinez-Alier. (2013). What is Degrowth? From Activist Slogan to Social Movement. Environmental Values, 22(2), 191-215. 
  • Dittmer, K. (2013). “Local Currencies for Purposive Degrowth? A Quality Check of Some Proposals for Changing Money-as-Usual.” Journal of Cleaner Production. 54, 3–13. 
  • Dombroski, K. (2015). “Multiplying Possibilities: A Postdevelopment Approach to Hygiene and Sanitation in Northwest China.” Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 56(3). 
  • Escobar, A. (2020). Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible. Duke University Press. 
  • --(2018). Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press. 
  • --(2015). “Degrowth, postdevelopment, and transitions: a preliminary conversation.” Sustainability Science, 10(2015). 
  • Farmer, P. (2008). “Surgery and global health: a view from beyond the OR.” World Journal of Surgery, 32(4), 533-536. 
  • Farmer, P., Kim, J.Y., Keinman, A., & M. Basilico. (2013). Reimaging Global Health: An Introduction. University of California Press. 
  • Ferguson, J. (2015). Give a Man a Fish: Reflection on the New Politics of Distribution. Duke University Press. 
  • Ferrei, M. (2018). “Refurbishment vs Demolition? Social Housing Campaigning for Degrowth.” In A. Nelson & F. Schneider (eds.) Housing for Degrowth. Routledge.
  • Gerber, J. & R.S. Raina. (2018). “Post-Growth in the Global South? Some Reflections from India and Bhutan.” Ecological Economics, 150(2018), 353-358.
  • Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2008). “Diverse economies: performative practices for ‘other worlds’.” Progress in Human Geography, 32(5). 
  • Gill, N. (2020). “Border Abolition and How to Achieve It.” In D. Cooper, N. Dhawan, and J. Newman (Eds.) Reimagining the State: Theoretical Challenges and Transformative Possibilities. Routledge. 
  • Hayden, D. (1980). “What Would a Non-Sexist City Be Like? Speculations on Housing, Urban Design and Human Work.” Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 5(3). 
  • Harvey, D. (2014). Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. Oxford University Press. 
  • --(2011). The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism. Profile Books. 
  • --(2010). Social Justice and the City. University of Georgia Press. 
  • Hinterberger, F., Santos, L., de Schutter, O., & P. Heidegger. (2018). “Trade and Environment Roundtable.” Post-Growth 2018 Conference, Brussels. https://www.postgrowth2018.eu/trade-and-climate/. 
  • Iskander, N. (2021). Does Skill Make Us Human? Migrant Workers in 21st Century Qatar and Beyond. Princeton University Press.
  • Kallis, G. (2015). “The Degrowth Alternative.” The Great Transition Initiative, February 2015. https://greattransition.org/publication/the-degrowth-alternative. 
  • --(2015). Yes, We Can Prosper Without Growth: 10 Policy Proposals for the New Left. This Changes Everything, January 23, 2015, http://theleap.thischangeseverything.org/yes-we-can-prosper-without-growth-10-policy-proposals-for-the-new-left/
  • Kallis, G., Paulson, S., D’Alisa, G., & F. DeMaria. (2020). The Case for Degrowth. Cambridge: Polity. 
  • Kelleher, F. (2019). “Why the World Needs an African Ecofeminist future” AfricanArguments.org. https://africanarguments.org/2019/03/why-world-needs-african-ecofeminist-future/
  • Kotari, A. et al. (Eds.) (2019). Pluriverse: A Post Development Dictionary. Columbia University Press.
  • Krahmer, K, (2022). “Degrowth and the City: Multiscalar strategies for the socio-ecological transformation of space and place.” City, 26(2-3), 316-345. 
  • Latouche, S. (2004). Degrowth Economics. Le Monde Diplomatique.
  • Martinez Alonso, L. (2020). “Barcelona’s housing policy under austerity urbanism: a contribution to the debate on degrowth and urban planning.” Local Environment, 27(4), 487-501. 
  • McKeown, T. (1976). The Role of Medicine: Dream, Mirage, or Medicine. Princeton University Press. 
  • McKinlay, J.B. & S.M. McKinlay. (1977). “The Questionable Contribution of Medical Measures to the Decline of Mortality in the United States in the Twentieth Century.” The Milbank Quarterly, 55. 
  • Mete, S. (2022). “Towards degrowth housing development? Lessons from a scenario-based gaming session in the Oslo region.” Local Environment, 27(4), 517-536. 
  • Miller, E. (2019). Reimagining Livelihoods: Life Beyond Economy, Society, and Environment. University of Minnesota Press. 
  • Missoni, E. (2015). “Degrowth and Health: Local Action should be Linked to Global Policies and Governance for Health,” Sustainable Science, 10. 
  • Moynihan, R. & R. Smith. (2002). “Too Much Medicine?” BMJ, 324(7342), 859-60. 
  • Muraca, B. (2012). “Towards a fair degrowth-society: Justice and the right to a ‘good life’ beyond growth.” Futures, 44(2012), 535-545.
  • Neate, R. (2014). “Scandal of Europe’s 11m Empty Homes.” The Guardian, February 23, 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/feb/23/europe-11m-empty-properties-enough-house-homeless-continent-twice. 
  • Nelson, A. & F. Schneider. (2019). Housing for Degrowth: Principles, Models, Challenges and Opportunities. Routledge. 
  • Parker, M.. Cheney, G., Fournier, V., & C. Land. (2014). The Routledge Companion to Alternative Organization. Routledge. 
  • Pettinger, L., Perry, J., Taylor, R., & M. Glucksmann. (2005). A New Sociology of Work. Blackwell.
  • Pollin, R. (2018). “De-growth vs. A Green New Deal.” New Left Review, 112. 
  • Reichel, A. (2018). “Degrowth and Free Trade.” AdfreReichel.de. [Blog Post] https://andrereichel.de/2016/10/18/degrowth-and-free-trade/
  • Rodriguez-Labajos, B. et al. (2019). “Not So Natural an Alliance? Degrowth and Environmental Justice Movements in the Global South.” Ecological Economics, 157 (2019), 175-184. 
  • Santarius, T. (2015). “Contribution to GTI Roundtable ‘On Degrowth’.” The Great Transition Initiative, February 2015. https://www.greattransition.org/commentary/tilman-santarius-the-degrowth-alternative-giorgos-kallis. 
  • Schneider, F., Asara, V., Sekulova, F., and J. Martinez-Alier. (2013). Sustainable housing in a post-growth Europe. A background paper for the Second Multinational Knowledge Brokerage Event on Sustainable Housing, Barcelona.
  • Schneider, F., Kallis, G. & J. Martinez-Alier. (2010). “Crisis or Opportunity? Economic Degrowth for Social Equity and Ecological Sustainability. Introduction to This Special Issue.” Journal of Cleaner Production, 18(6), 511–518. 
  • Schumacher, E.F. (1989). Small is beautiful: economics as if people mattered. Harper and Row. 
  • Sekulova, F. (2016). “What are the degrowth implications for long-distance trade?” A Presentation at the 5th International Conference on Degrowth, Budapest. 
  • Smith, K. & M. Ezzati. (2005). “How Environmental Health Risks Change with Development: The Epidemiologic and Environmental Risks Transitions Revisited.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 30(1). 
  • Tamale, S. (2020). Decolonization and Afro-Feminism. Daraja Press. 
  • Telschow, M. & P. Sutton. (2003). Townships and the Spirit of Ubuntu. Clifton. 
  • Vandenhole, W. (2018). “De-Growth and Sustainable Development: Rethinking Human Rights Law and Poverty Alleviation.” Law and Development Review, https://doi.org/10.1515/ldr-2018-0033. 
  • Williams, C. (2010). “Beyond the Market/Non-market Divide a Total Social Organization of Labour Perspective,” International Journal of Social Economics, 37(6). 
  • Xue, J. (2021). “Urban planning and degrowth: a missing dialogue,” Local Environment, DOI: 10.1080/13549839.2020.1867840. 
  • --(2018). “Housing for Degrowth: Space, Planning and Distribution.” In A. Nelson & F. Schneider (eds.) Housing for Degrowth. Routledge.