P R O C E E D I N G S
ABOUT THE SYMPOSIUM
„Global society has not yet understood the distinction between physical expansion and qualitative development. It has passed the stage where more physical expansion is desirable. No widely-shared global goal is now served by having more people or material goods. Now it is important to learn how to advance the development of our speciesachieving equity, peace, psychological balance, physical health, environmental quality.”
- Dennis Meadows
Degrowth has been explored in many disciplines, but there is not yet a single unified model. Still, researchers and activists agree that some form of degrowth or something similar—is unavoidable. The concept can be understood in three overlapping ways: as a slogan, a social movement, and a scientific theory. This symposium emphasizes the last of these, while also showcasing real-world examples.
The first day of the symposium offers a general introduction to the degrowth paradigm. Sessions will trace its intellectual roots in economics, activism, the social and hard sciences, highlighting how these fields have challenged the assumption of infinite growth since the 1970s. Contributors will outline why continuous economic expansion is environmentally unsustainable and socially unjust, and present alternative models that prioritize wellbeing, equity, and ecological balance. This opening day sets the stage for the more specific architectural and urban discussions that follow.
The second day turns to the architecture and urbanism of degrowth, exploring scales from small interventions and housing to entire neighborhoods and cities. While ecological economics and related fields have debated degrowth for decades, its architectural and urban applications are still emerging. Presentations will highlight key theoretical contributions alongside international and Hungarian examples that demonstrate how degrowth can be translated into practice.
Understood as an umbrella concept, the architecture of degrowth includes critiques of architectural education and the construction industry, reflections on the ethical role of design, and proposals for concrete alternatives. Because these challenges require collaboration across disciplines, the day emphasizes approaches that combine design practice with social participation and activism. The goal is to open up an interpretive field that offers practical ideas for practitioners while encouraging critical debate among professionals.
As a satellite program of the symposium, the Degrowth Design exhibition presents a curated selection of poster works by Hungarian graduate and doctoral students. The call invited design and art projects that engage with themes of degrowth, ecological awareness, and critical perspectives on growth. During the opening, the participating artists will briefly introduce their works in two-minute presentations. The exhibition will be opened by Zsuzsanna Gál.
INTRODUCTION
by Márton Szentpéteri
Good Morning, Everyone.
On my imaginary slide there’s a simple curve: a parabola. It rises, it reaches a peak, and then it bends quietly but decisively into another direction. I want to use that shape – an embodied cognitive metaphor of a rhetorical form by the way – as more than a graph. I want to use it as a diagnosis, and as an invitation. Because the story of modernity our story of progress, extraction, acceleration, the story of the “more” has been narrated as if it were an endless upward line. But our lived reality looks less like a line and more like this arc: a powerful climb powered by fossil abundance, colonial supply chains, and the fantasy that the Earth is a warehouse and the future is a landfill. The parabola lets us say, without melodrama: every growth curve has a turning point. Not because someone became pessimistic, but because limits are real, and because the costs we kept off the balance sheet have begun to demand payment in the climate, in biodiversity loss, in bodies, in burnout, in the thick atmosphere of anxiety we call “normal.”
So when we speak today about unsustainability, we’re not just describing “a few problems to fix.” We’re naming a condition: that the dominant way we produce, consume, and design life is structurally incompatible with the planet’s boundaries and with human flourishing. And when we speak about degrowth, we’re not romanticizing scarcity. We’re exploring a deliberate, democratic, and caring descent from the peak—choosing how we come down the slope, so the landing is dignified rather than catastrophic.
Now, in Greek there is a word that names precisely this turning point in the parabola: metanoia. Often translated as repentance, but philosophically it is first of all a change of mind a reorientation, a conversion of perception. The crucial point is not moral selfflagellation. What’s at stake is something more difficult: admitting that we were wrong about what “the good life” means, wrong about what “success” measures, wrong about what design is for. In today’s language, metanoia is not just a religious term it’s a way to describe what design culture studies and design theory keep circling: that our infrastructures are made of ideas, and if we want different worlds, we need different minds.
That’s why I like the figure of the “edpert” the expert who is here not to deliver answers from above, but to help us practice this shift: to notice what our habits hide, to unlearn what felt natural, to make room for a new common sense. Not a new dogma. A new literacy: ecological, social, material, energetic.
And this is where I want to bring in Marina Garcés’ notion of a New Radical Enlightenment in what she calls the posthumous condition: living after the death of certain promises after the end of the myth that progress automatically means improvement, after the collapse of the idea that knowledge equals control. A radical enlightenment today is not the arrogance of mastery. It is the courage to see clearly, together, and to act without guarantees.
But clarity alone doesn’t change us. Facts can be correct and still leave us untouched. So we need something else something that reaches deeper than argument. Here I want to speak of baptism, not as institutional ritual, but as a model of transformation: a passage that marks you. I want to claim: baptism is art. Art in the sense of a practice that makes an idea perceptible and unforgettable. Not a decoration on top of the world, but a force that engraves a new sensitivity into us.
Let’s call this an engramma a secret tattoo. An imprint that remains with us.
Let me refer here to a harsh medieval image: beating the bounds—a communal walk along the borders of a parish before professional cartography, where children were struck at key landmarks so they would never forget the boundary. I’m not invoking this to glorify violence. I’m invoking it because it exposes a truth about memory: what is embodied becomes durable. The boundary becomes real because it is inscribed painfully into the body.
Our era also needs a boundary lesson: not the boundary of a parish, but the boundary of a planet. We need to remember, in our bones, that there are thresholds we cannot cross without consequence. Art can be that nonviolent baptismal shock: an experience of emergency that does not merely inform us, but forms us so that “limits” stop sounding like a policy word and start feeling like a shared, lived reality.
And then after metanoia, after baptism comes the phrase the Gospel repeats: new life. New life does not mean an easier life. The Gospel never promised ease; it promised meaning, courage, and a different direction. The call to the Twelve is strikingly antiaccumulative: travel light, don’t hoard, depend on hospitality, practice care and attention, accept rejection, keep moving, keep witnessing. That is not a blueprint, of course but it resonates with what degrowth asks of us: to step out of the religion of “more,” and into an ethics of sufficiency, repair, reciprocity, and shared vulnerability.
So the “new life” I want to name today is design for decline—degrowth not as collapse, but as craft. A design culture and methodology that learns to make “less” livable: fewer extractions, fewer harmful products, fewer unnecessary speeds while expanding what actually sustains life: maintenance, care, public goods, convivial spaces, durable objects, collective competence, and democratic decisions about what we stop doing.
Santiago Zabala gives us a phrase for the mood of this work: decent decadence. Not cynical resignation, and not heroic salvation fantasies but a dignified acceptance that the age of limitless expansion is over, and that our task is to make the downslope humane, even beautiful in a restrained way: decent.
So if the parabola is our map, let’s read it carefully. The vertex—the turning point—is not the end. It’s the moment of metanoia. The slope downward is not defeat. It is the corridor where a new practice becomes possible: a post-growth imagination grounded in material reality, baptized by art into memory, and committed despite growing difficulties to a livable world.
That’s what I hope we can begin together today: not merely to discuss degrowth, but to let it work on us as a change of mind; not merely to diagnose unsustainability, but to cross a threshold into new life into designs, institutions, and cultures that can carry us down the curve with care.
Thank you.
THE SPATIAL IS THE POLITICAL
Keynote speech by Anitra
Nelson
1. Many thanks for asking me to participate in this symposium online. It’s 7 o’clock in the evening here in Victoria, the south-eastern mainland state of Australia. Australia is a fractured settler society, so it is customary for us to acknowledge the traditional owners in our region.
I live work and play on land of the Dja Dja Wurrung people who have cared for and lived as one with Djarra Country for tens of thousands of years. But, for the last couple of hundred years, they and their Country have been assaulted by European settlement and capitalist ways of life. Given that hundreds of distinctive Indigenous peoples known collectively as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders have continued to defend and regenerate traditional values and practices in their Country, they offer guides for degrowth activists and scholars who also struggle for just and sustainable lifeways.
Degrowth
2. Economic growth is a key dynamic of, and intrinsic to, the global ecologically and socially destructive capitalist system. In response, degrowth imaginaries represent postcapitalist realities to work towards that aim to deliver just and ecologically sustainable lifeways. In short, degrowth is an holistic socio-ecological concept and practice addressing multivarious ecological unsustainabilities and sociopolitical inequities. Transforming architecture, planning and urbanism in degrowth directions implies breaking free of, and breaking down, destructive structures and specialisations characteristic of capitalism. At the same time degrowth activities offer observational and experiential opportunities to live and collectively provision sustainably, respecting Earth and other people concurrently. This is a difficult act as all of us here well know.
It’s a difficult act because the transformation needs to be a performed, collective, embodied and material transformation. For instance, housing needs to be formed, reformed and lived in differently. Routes that we take to travel, and transport itself, need to be totally transformed. Most of the space that we live in is the private, exclusive and highly regulated property of capital, which takes many technological forms. Technology chosen by capitalists, owned and managed as a very effective power-over, a seductive power-over and a violent, limiting power-over.
3. Private institutional clients and the construction industry have a major influence in constraining and permitting space for architects and planners to do their work. So-called public space is regulated by states that demand a deep respect of capitalism as a lifeway. So we need to acknowledge that degrowth is a difficult act because it centres on changing fundamental and powerful relationships from a inherited position of subservience and antagonism.
We are social change agents in an imperialist system. Growth is expansive and intensive. To turn this system on its head – to free ourselves from it while making a new world to replace it – requires great effort. In contrast to the deep and negative individualism of the system we’re challenging, we’re required to introduce and engage in entirely different relationships in which many people have few skills and experience, that is collective action focusing on collaboration and co-governance, including participatory discursive planning.
Degrowth planning practices
4. Examples of such relationship reorganising are n’UNDO practitioners who, since 2012 have been creating hybrid prefigurative participatory planning processes. Hybrid as in one foot in late capitalism and the other in degrowth futures. N’UNDO approaches of not doing, of undoing and redoing offer hope in the here and now, but point firmly to a world in which self-organising will be as commonplace as hierarchies are today. The processes n’UNDO has developed from their degrowth approach offer inspiration, the results of their work-in-progress experiences in their book Not Do, Redo and Undo to Build Cities (released in an English translation earlier this year, 2025). We look forward to hearing details about n’UNDO later in this session. Urban development is defined in terms of creating, maintaining, operating and expanding stocks of buildings and infrastructure. These activities are majorly responsible for material exploitation of Earth, regenerating carbon emissions and negatively impacting on the non-urban. Such urban developments are a hub of the growth drive by states as crucial handmaidens of capital. A drive reproducing inequities and competition, using humanity and the rest of living Earth as mere resources to accumulate private property for the elite who determine our future via their investments.
5. Such politics demand critical interventions of degrowth-aligned planners and urbanists such as Jin Xue, [gin shree] who will also speak in this session. She (in Xue and Kębłowski 2022, 398–399) has described urban degrowth in terms of an economic downscaling ‘to respect the planetary biocapacity and to ensure social justice’ resulting in ‘compact’, ‘non-capitalist, vibrant and resilient’ cities. She correctly emphasises ways that degrowth challenges the discipline and practice of planning, what we might refer to as a reality of capitalist planning and an ideal of degrowth planning. This is a key question for educators of planners, for planning researchers, and professional planners who are often stuck in relatively bureaucratic and hierarchically structured governmental positions. Major planning decision-making is relatively political, spatially and hierarchically organised from generic state frameworks to provinces and regions and finally to municipalities where planners apply given regulations. As such planning at a local level has a low status in the field which is very oriented to the challenges of massive cities.
Settlement patterns
6. In other words planning reflects the bias of capitalism for concentration, for big is better solutions, mimicking a growth orientation in terms of scale. Urban and rural are distinctive units reflecting an urban–rural contradiction, and unequal exchange. A key concern for degrowth is to analyse and advocate for universals in degrowth patterns of settlements to create and inhabit. I support decentralisation for ecological and social reasons. I see an ideal future in which people are responsible members of beneficial ecological communities, wherein proximity is a priority in material, energetic and cultural relations. Imagine numbers of relatively collectively sufficient settlements following a bioregional rationale with porous boundaries and strong interrelationships. Such a degrowth framing of ideal settlements is reminiscent of certain ways that the around 600 Indigenous language groups who inhabited Australia before white settlement lived. Collective sufficiency would be based on bioregional units typically aspiring to selfreliance but necessarily entailing mutually agreeable planning, provisioning and exchanges with other regions.
7. As a rule of thumb proximity enables ecological efficiencies. Scaled out the local sourcing of water and electricity in ways that respect the regeneration of human and other-than-human needs allow for more sophisticated, adaptable, flexible, just and sustainable lifeways. The authors of the ‘Degrowth-aligned commoning organisations’ (Robra et al. 2015) chapter in the Routledge Handbook of Degrowth identify commoning as the ideal degrowth form of organising localised production-cum-consumption. They offer examples of an Australian capital city tool library and a Greek energy community, showing that localised, self-organised, and needs-oriented commoning of small-scale renewable energy systems offer major benefits. For instance, energy communities selforganise to determine who is prioritised when energy flows are low. ‘Small’ degrowth energy communities are a transformative exemplar of wider and deeper degrowth transformations which can be applied globally. Australia has the highest number of household solar photovoltaic panels per capita in the world. Local community-based solar distributed systems are attracting interest because they enhance energy resilience through battery storage and community-based management.
8. Living on the driest continent on Earth around a quarter of Australian households collect water to use off roofs and store it in water tanks, treat grey-water and/or access bores and wells. Living in households that totally rely on household water collection and storage prompts members to be especially careful of water use and abuse. Communities that take responsibility for their sustainability practices experience crucial transformations in their consciousness of Earth’s bounty and limits. This is where collaborative working-with approach of other panellists RÉT landscape architects Anita and Marietta offer a pathway for co-designing community-oriented degrowth futures.
Their nature-based action research approaches to water retention, landscape recovery and enhancement result in micro-agroecological systems, agroforestry and permaculture designs. Such practices fit neatly into nuanced, decentralised, as well as ecologically and socially connected landscapes, based on ecological respect and potential for human settlement. This requires transforming away from the spectrums of sprawling or compact cities and largely depopulated or marginalised rural landscapes marked by industrial agriculture, instead moving toward settlements where humans identify more as beings within various and numerous ecological communities.
9. A decentralising perspective addressing the urban–rural binary is hinted at in the permaculture inspired work of Sam Alexander and Brendan Gleeson (2019) in Degrowth in the Suburbs. Yet Terry Leahy on Melbourne, and others regarding international examples, point out that many cities can’t be made self-sustaining in their boundaries even just in food. So, I’d like to see constructive engagement with holistic degrowth imaginaries that interconnect and intertwine the rural and urban dichotomies with prefiguration taking place in degrowth formations such as Cargonomia, whose urban bike-oriented activities combine and connect with their peri-urban farm through community supported agricultural style activities.
Degrowth: Working with one another and Earth
10. Turning to another key topic, treating homes as assets, as exclusive private property, has led to global housing crises. Instead, as in Housing First principles and practices, we might consider housing as a foundation enabling satisfaction of further needs by taking a holistic, needs-based and people-centred approach. Arguments for degrowth housing and planning not only acknowledge the right to housing but also the right for people to cocreate their housing. Beyond that, support for a ‘right to the city’ that encompasses a ‘right to metabolism’ (Olsen et al. 2018), means creating rights and responsibilities for clean water, unpolluted air and just and sustainable land use.
Daniel from TIMBOO (2020–) explores both bamboo and forest sources for materials, techniques and community-oriented farming and self-buildings to exemplify the innovative opportunities that degrowth approaches offer. These types of experimentation can have falling domino effects as others pick up on these leads to trial them in other landscapes – where they can be customised and adapted to local conditions, local ecological and social needs and/or lead to exploration and design of other types of innovation.
Degrowth: the struggle
11. Scale impacts on our discourse and practice in many conflicting ways. Mainstream architects typify one end of a spectrum, often focussing on one building at a time within a site. At the other end of the spectrum urbanists are often planners with a James C. Scott ‘seeing like a state’ lens of zoning, policies and regulations. In between, landscape architects engage with sites in terms of remnant nature, revegetation and/or cultural conservation. These are broad brush strokes. Panellists might well take issue on such descriptors and offer more suitable ones. Still, all would contemporary architects and urbanists are the ‘meat in the sandwich’ between capitalist clients and grassroots claims for degrowth futures, de-architecture and de-urbanism.
Highlighting the small-scale, Architecture Uncomfortable Workshop understands the deep importance of interior space and form. While the material they work with seems small, which could be read as insignificant, their work is highly significant in the context of the immediacy of everyday life. At the butt end of critics who dismiss so called small as insignificant, a theme in this short talk is to provoke us to trouble such arguments and interrogate the meaning of scale more in terms of its humane and ecological degrowth foci, including the significance of each and every one of us transforming.
The Spatial is the Political
12. Architects and designers, planners and landscape architects can use platforms such as the Postgrowth Cities Coalitionfor transdisciplinary interventions and collaboration. How we discuss what needs to be done needs to bridge towards grassroots activists engaging in self-built and collectively occupied housing, in political squatting, tenant housing, social housing, rights to the city and the urban social metabolism, and in commoning –traversing and integrated within various rural as well as urban activities.
So, we need to confront the ‘elephant in the room’ – capitalism particularly in the form of the hungry developer-cum-construction industry sector. A successful transformation to a genuine degrowth future of self-organisation, requires the release Earth from the practice of exclusively used private property. What is called for here is not simply an occupation of squares and streets that are public and ought to be ours but, rather, for an occupation of Earth as our very being.
The spatial is the political.
WHEN DID THE REASONABLE BECOME RADICAL?
Introduction by Boglárka Jakabfi-Kovács
On February 17, 1600, Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake among other reasons, because despite imprisonment and torture he refused to recant his claims about the existence of multiple solar systems. When the mainstream doctrine held that the Sun and all celestial bodies revolved around the Earth, a worldview exceeding even heliocentrism appeared extreme.
I am not comparing ourselves tot he genious Giordano, especially because contrary to his ideas at that time, what we claim is proven and reasonable – yet, we are labelled radicals and enemies of progress.
Thinkers today are no longer in danger of being literally burned alive as punishment. Yet we, as humankind, are very much in danger of burning ourselves alive through greed, ignorance, and a lack of imagination. Continuous economic growth is not only physically impossible but also environmentally unsustainable and socially unjust. Each of these statements is empirically substantiated. The authors of The Limits to Growth have been repeating this warning for over fifty years, and still we search for loopholes.
The situation is as follows: we are cutting down, with an axe, the very tree on which we sit. With every strike, the trunk weakens; its fall direction is already visible, leaves and bird nests are dropping. Science keeps reminding us that when the tree falls, we will fall with it. Yet we continue to hope either that it will fall much later, or we will invent a technology that makes the tree float.
Those who warn us are labelled as radicals, as enemies of progress.
The concept of degrowth whether we call it ecological politics, environmental ethics, radical activism, voluntary simplicity, entropy theory, steady-state economy, or ecological economics arises from the recognition that a good human life cannot be achieved at the expense of nature, including humanity itself. The goal cannot be the endless accumulation of goods, and the resulting socio-ecological crisis cannot be solved within the current systems of production and consumption.
Perhaps a better concept than degrowth exists but why is what is reasonable called radical?
Why global urban climate protection goals continue to fail, despite most countries having voluntarily committed to reducing emissions. The answer lies within the persistent logic of economic growth: both mainstream urban development and so-called sustainable planning models operate explicitly or implicitly under the imperatives of growth. Rather than addressing the root causes of social and ecological crises, they treat symptoms while generating new systemic instabilities. I propose that degrowth urbanism is not a radical fringe of mainstream planning but the only rational response to the combined ecological and civilizational crises. Different models of urban development are shaped by prevailing economic policy values, which determine both their priorities and their forms. A tool commonly used in systems thinking, the Iceberg Model (Senge, 1990), shows that the events visible at the surface are driven by underlying structures and value systems. If the tip of the iceberg represents the visible world, what do our public spaces reveal about our society, our shared values, and our relationship to the living world? Prevailing policy values tend to treat phenomena such as the increasing emissions associated with development in all countries as “side effects” of our socio-economic system. However, systems theory argues that a system is functioning exactly as intended according to the conditions and structures shaped by its underlying value framework. There are no side effects.
The speakers of this symposium are beacons of light: outstanding figures in their respective fields, yet also seekers. With conviction and intellectual honesty, they persist in searching for solutions and testing new ideas. It is a privilege to hear them. I invite you to receive their “radical” thoughts with openness. And now let me introduce you our keynote speaker of the day, Anitra Nelson from Australia, Melbourne. She is an activist scholar, author of several books, and most recently co-edited the routledge handbook of degrowth with Vincent Liegey.
WORLDVIEW CAPITULATIONS FOR DEGROWTH
Abstract by Alexandra Köves
Degrowth is about transcending everything we have been told about how the economy and the world must work not just for the sake of stopping the ecological havoc we are creating but also to feel better in our human existence. However, for this we need to lose age-old innervations and question fundamentals about ourselves and the world around us that had not been questioned by the mainstream for at least a couple of hundred years. The most important paradigm shift happening at the moment in terms of worldviews is the shift from the mechanistic way of looking at things towards the holistic systems view that may bring us closer to embracing the complex world we live in. Through the systems view of life we look at uncertainty, ambiguity, cooperation, coordination, knowledge, separation, hierarchy, responsibility, autonomy truly differently. But can these worldview capitulations happen on the individual and collective levels? If yes, how? And if they do, what kind of changes could they ignite?
THE ORIGINS OF DEGROWTH
Abstract by Vincent Liegey
Degrowth emerged in France in the early 2000s. It was the result of a meeting between two groups. On one side were anti-advertising activists in Lyon, Les Casseurs de Pub, who had read Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen. On the other was a group of Global North and South non-academic intellectuals interested in post-development and active in the MAUSS (anti-utilitarian movement in the social sciences). But the origins of degrowth as a concept can be traced back even further, from utopian socialism to the Luddites, naturist and certain fringe anarchist movements. The 1970s also saw lively debate on the end of growth, also in its desirable anthropological dimension. In this presentation, I propose to revisit the richness of these founding pillars of degrowth, which have unfortunately been overlooked in recent scientific literature, and to analyse both the reasons for this and the risks it entails.
EXTRACTION BY DESIGN: PLATFORMS, LITHIUM, AND THE PRICE OF DIGITAL LIFE
Abstract by Ivana Stepanović
Digital wellbeing is marketed as self-management through balance, screen-time limits, and digital detox. This neoliberal framing places responsibility on individuals while ignoring the material foundations and environmental costs of technology. Every swipe on a smartphone depends on the extraction of lithium, water, and other finite resources. From mining and assembly to e-waste, the digital value chain reveals how wellbeing is entangled with exploitation and depletion. In Serbia and other semi-peripheral regions, new lithium mining projects expose how narratives of technological progress are intertwined with neocolonial extraction. Lithium is often promoted as the “kryptonite” of modern growth, symbolizing green transition and prosperity, while local resistance movements offer counter-narratives of solidarity, modest living, and coexistence with nature. Platforms are built to sustain the logic of growth by keeping users permanently engaged. Digital culture promotes conspicuous consumption that conceals its extractive underbelly of labour, pollution, and waste. Remaining wired into this system keeps us unwell while the planet absorbs the cost. To move beyond overconsumption, we must reject growth as the measure of progress and embrace economies of wellbeing, sufficiency, and care within planetary boundaries. Reframing wellbeing as shared sufficiency allows us to ask a deeper question: how much connection does a good life truly require?
DEGROWTH PHILOSOPHY?
A MAPPING OF SYNCHRONIES
Abstract by Liisi Keedus
While degrowth has emerged as a powerful critique of the growth-dependent socioeconomic paradigm, philosophical engagement with the concept remains surprisingly sparse. In my talk, I will argue that both a broader and more elaborate philosophical anchoring is crucial to reimagine political, spatial, temporal - and aesthetic - imaginaries beyond the logic of accumulation. Drawing on ongoing research, I propose a preliminary mapping of intersections between contemporary environmental and political philosophies and postgrowth research, exploring how the philosophical traditions of relational ontologies, interdependent epistemologies, and posthumanist ethics can critically enrich degrowth’s normative and conceptual foundations. Additionally, drawing on work in environmental and eco-aesthetics, I explore the ways in which aesthetic practices - such as visual art, design, or architecture - can help advance values like finitude, care, and interdependence. Degrowth requires not only a counter-aesthetic - one that shifts attention from spectacle to situatedness, from speed to stillness, and from abundance to sufficiency - but also an appreciation of its occasional yet crucial conjunctions with contemporary theories of political aesthetics.
THE DEGROWTH AI ALGORITHM: CAN THE TOOL OF ACCELERATION BECOME THE ENGINE OF DEGROWTH?
Abstract by Prof. David Daou
The prevailing trajectory of artificial intelligence is one of unsustainable acceleration, driving hyper-consumption, energy-intensive infrastructure, spreading tons of CO2 emissions, and the rapid obsolescence of both products and people. This path, if unchecked, will not lead to boundless growth but will instead become a direct catalyst for an involuntary and chaotic form of degrowth imposed by climate breakdown, resource depletion, and social fracture. But what if we could invert this dynamic? This presentation confronts this paradox head-on, arguing that the very tool of acceleration can be radically repurposed.
SUFFICIENCY PLANNING
Abstract by Prof. Jin Xue
Planning as a profession holds significant potential to drive societal transformation, particularly by challenging the normative focus on perpetual growth. However, current planning practices remain growth-driven, dependent, and oriented towards growth. As a result, the exploration of alternative urban visions and the reimagining of planning towards degrowth futures have emerged as a critical research area. This shift is sparking debates about spatializing degrowth and reshaping the planning profession. This presentation will critically examine the foundational assumptions behind the ever-growth paradigm in urban development and planning. It will also propose new agendas for how planning can adapt and evolve in response to the polycrisis. Drawing on critical realism, the presentation will revisit the ontology of planning, aiming to transform it into an enabling force for degrowth. Integrating the sufficiency idea – which embraces both sufficientarianism and limitarianism, a new paradigm of planning is proposed.
THE URBANISM OF SUFFICIENCY TO FACE GLOBAL CHALLENGES
Abstract by n’UNDO
The Urbanism of Sufficiency, articulated by the n'UNDO Essential Methodology, proposes a radical paradigm shift: prioritizing Subtraction as a territorial management tool. This ethical and rigorous approach abandons the inertia of excess to focus on the essential, ensuring solvency against resource scarcity and the climate emergency. Through Technical Activism, it secures long-term resilience and viability, demonstrating that knowing how to subtract is the most ambitious strategy for building a habitable future.
ARE WE SPATIALIZING DEGROWTH? STELLAR MOMENTS AND PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE IN SUISSE ROMANDE
Abstract by José Berbiela Bustamante
We are a small architecture and planning practice based in Renens, Lausanne (Switzerland), working across the whole of the Suisse Romande region. In our professional practice, all our projects are grounded in participation and in an approach based on the available resources, both material and immaterial. However, after being invited to the Spatialising Degrowth International Symposium, we asked ourselves:
Are we spatialising degrowth?
To explore this question, we revisited some of our projects, ranging from craftsmanship to public space design to land-use planning, and found that there is no clear or definitive answer. What we have learned is:
1. that it depends greatly on the scale, the impact, and the limits from which each project is analysed, and
2. that in most projects there is a key moment, a stellar moment like Stefan Zweig’s Sternstunden, when everything is at stake, even if it ultimately comes down to a seemingly minor detail.
If we consider scale, impact, and limits, a project with a very high percentage of material reuse for the furnishing of a lobby becomes diminished when placed within a newly constructed reinforced concrete building. Likewise, it is difficult to assess the real impact of participatory workshops with citizens for the revision of a land-use plan when, in the end, the municipality rejects most of the measures aimed at limiting growth. When it comes to details, we are acutely aware of what it can mean to remove the final sentence in a building regulation that calls for avoiding demolitions. Similarly, we have encountered architecture competitions whose briefs theoretically promote responsible architecture, yet require the construction of housing in order to fully exploit the site’s building capacity and economic profitability.
Stellar moments are not always evident, and sometimes you are not aware of them until they have passed and it is no longer possible to go back. They are an instant in which the move of not building is launched, without any expectation of success, towards a team of architects and designers with a strong environmental awareness. At other times, it has been the lucidity of realising that the conditions are perfect to carry out the transformation of public spaces, school playgrounds, where we remove what is superfluous, seek to enrich learning environments, and enable a greater development of biodiversity.