Cities Beyond Growth Policy Primer

This policy primer for Cities Beyond Growth outlines practices and policies that enable urban environments to thrive beyond GDP growth. While post-growth and wellbeing economy ideas are gaining visibility, concrete pathways for change have largely remained under-explored. This can make it hard to translate ambition into action. This policy primer offers accessible explanations and practical insights that connect post-growth principles to real-world policy, bridging the gap between vision and practice. It contains learnings and strategies for citizens and public bodies in cities to increase their transformative agency and accelerate their post- growth transition in times of climate emergency. The primer builds on existing practices and policies in mostly European cities but also draws from other contexts when relevant.

The need to transition towards an economy that functions within planetary boundaries and is more socially just is clear. Our current economic system is unsustainable and has driven us into a wider, interconnected eco-social crisis, in which ecological breakdown and social inequality are mutually reinforcing. Cities are the places where economic practices directly shape everyday realities. Most people live in cities and what happens here has a disproportionately large impact.

The current growth and profit-oriented economic model, reliant on carbon-intensive and extractive practices, is harming planetary health by generating CO2 emissions and numerous other adverse environmental harms.1 With 7 of the 9 planetary boundaries identified by scientists already breached, the current economic system will lead to ecosystem collapse unless it undergoes profound transformation.2

As cities are among the largest carbon emitters, reducing their emissions and environmental footprints is key. Our cities function the way they do due to the high material throughput, largely relying on the constant supply of energy. Energy is needed for heating, cooking, food production, mobility and the digital infrastructure. The continued reliance of cities on fossil fuels is a major driver of the problem, yet scaling up renewables alone cannot meet our ever- growing energy demand. The current expansion of renewable sources, the so-called “energy transition”, does not replace fossil fuels but rather expands overall energy use.3 Furthermore, emissions are not the only problem, as growth is inseparable from material impact. Renewable energy itself depends on the extraction of raw minerals, which is linked to severe impacts for local communities and ecosystems.4

The social fabric in European cities is fraying too. The negative impacts of consumer cultures and productivity-driven competitive work cultures become impossible to ignore as anxiety and loneliness are increasingly widespread.5 Moreover, unprecedented concentrations of wealth in the hands of a few have produced dangerous asymmetries of power, eroding the stability of our parliamentary democracies and the international geopolitical order. This inequity is structurally reflected in cities, for example, by the sharp increase in house and rental prices, which has widened the gap between those who can afford decent housing and those who cannot. In combination with rising energy prices and a poorly insulated housing stock, this has exacerbated the risk of energy poverty among many households. Similarly, the way food is currently produced, processed, distributed, consumed and disposed of is highly dependent on energy inputs and is a main driver of social injustices and ecological crisis. Over the past decades, global food systems have become increasingly industrialised and structured according to the logics of economic growth and accumulation.6

Digital technologies, the control of which has become highly concentrated in a few large private tech corporations, are largely reinforcing and accelerating these extractive dynamics through centralised platforms and practices such as mass surveillance. The energy demands of data centres, now spurred by the AI boom, are almost incomprehensible.7 Here too, growth remains the guiding mantra, even as its societal benefits remain unclear. We see the effects of the current economic system every day, through droughts, floods, fires, deepening social inequality, poverty, precarity, mental health crises and popular unrest. The political results are also in plain sight: a profound erosion of public trust in institutions, deepening geopolitical instability and the resurgence of fascism. If we want to reverse this situation and move toward prosperity within planetary boundaries, we will have to drastically change the way in which we provision for our needs. How do we transition to an economy that is socially and ecologically sustainable? What can cities do? In this primer, we first present key concepts and several overarching policies. We then explore five areas of basic need: energy, food, housing, mobility, and digital technology. Each section presents a range of post-growth practices and outlines key policies that cities can adopt to support them.