Cities Beyond Growth Education handbook

About Cities Beyond Growth

Cities are at the heart of the climate and overall ecological crisis – but also have the opportunity to be at the core of its solutions. They concentrate carbon emissions, inequalities, and political decisions that shape the lives of millions. But cities are also where communities organise, where cooperatives build alternatives, and where local governments can act – often more quickly than national states. They are, in short, the most promising arena for transformative change.

This handbook is the product of Cities Beyond Growth, a transnational project funded by the European Union’s Erasmus+ programme.1 The project brought together six civil society organisations from five European cities – Transnational Institute (TNI) and Commons Network from Amsterdam (Netherlands), Oikos from Ghent (Belgium), FUHEM from Madrid (Spain), NaZemi from Brno (Czechia), and Institut za političku ekologiju (IPE) from Zagreb (Croatia)– around a shared conviction: that the transition towards sustainable and climate-resilient cities requires not only technical solutions, but a fundamental shift in how we understand the economy, care, and democratic participation.

The project’s starting point is that growth-oriented economic models are no longer sustainable – ecologically, socially, or politically. Any economy that aspires to deliver decent living conditions for present and future generations must operate within planetary boundaries. This means moving beyond growth as the organising logic of urban development, and towards a post-growth economy built on wellbeing, sufficiency, and democratic self-determination.

The Cities Beyond Growth Project focuses on the educational dimension of fostering the needed change. Between 2024 and 2026, the project designed, tested, and refined a two-part educational programme – a general online course and locally adapted in-person module – delivered to approximately 1300 stakeholders globally and subsequently across six specific cities. The goal was not only to build knowledge, but to design educational processes to directly empower communities and local government representatives to become agents of inclusive, democratic post-growth transitions in their own cities.