@Sofia Greaves
When: 21 -23 October 2026
Where: Amsterdam, The Nerthelands
Degrowth has gained wide traction as both a critique of contemporary capitalism and an agenda for emancipatory and democratic spatial politics. Despite its increasing visibility and popularity in both research and practice, degrowth still lacks a thorough and systematic development of a spatial perspective.
Space is a relation of power, a material condition, a means and a target of degrowth politics. A degrowth transformation necessarily implies a reorganization of socio-metabolic relations and socio-material flows of matter, capital and energy across spatial scales, as well as a different cultural imaginary of how we as humans, think about our relation to spatial dynamics. Space is also a target of radical politics that aims to address the destructive impact of endless economic growth upon marginalized social groups and endangered ecosystems, while guaranteeing the provision of essential and universal goods and services for all. Degrowth envisions a spatial politics that questions hierarchies and borders and surpasses the underlying socio-cultural frames that sustain intrinsically toxic growth, like militarization, colonialism, anthropocentrism, patriarchy and racism.
A spatial perspective which is multiscalar and relational can help to both calibrate radical degrowth practices to specific socio-cultural contexts and to interconnect them across scales and sectors. This is the challenge that this conference will tackle, both for research and for practice.
This conference brings together contributions from both research and practice to develop tools for degrowth-oriented thought and action.
If you have questions for the conference organizers you can reach them over email: degrowthpsconference @ proton.me
Recently, an article on degrowth appeared in Harvard Business Review (hereafter HBR). Rather than offering a critique of capitalism, the article proposes that degrowth may not be a threat to business after all, and in fact, there are burgeoning degrowth markets waiting to be tapped into by the risk averse. Although we applaud the authors in getting the word “degrowth” into the illustrious pages...
When our book Post-Growth Society was published in 2010 in German, the term was entirely unheard of. Today, Post-Growth is the harsh reality in many countries, but this phenomenon is considered to be transitory. Governmental investment subsidies and infrastructure spending, consumer incentive programs and a generous monetary policy are supposed to re-stimulate growth. Additional governmental e...
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