Cities Beyond Growth is a six-week online course that invites you to reimagine urban life through the lens of post-growth thinking, an approach that recognises that more GDP doesn’t always mean better lives, especially when it comes at the cost of social equity and ecological survival.
This course is for activists, policymakers, planners, researchers, and all those committed to building cities that prioritise justice, care, and ecological balance.
Date: 8 October 2025 – 12 November 2025
Location: Moodle/ZOOM
Register and find more information here
As cities around the world face deepening inequality, intersecting ecological crises, housing precarity, and care systems stretched to their limits, it has become increasingly clear that business-as-usual approaches are no longer viable. At the same time, cities remain fertile ground for bold and systemic transformation.
Cities Beyond Growth is a six-week online course that invites participants to critically engage with post-growth urbanism, an approach that challenges the dominance of GDP growth as a measure of progress and instead centers ecological sustainability, social justice, and collective wellbeing.
Each week, we examine a key domain of urban life including housing, mobility, energy, digitalisation, food, democracy, and care, and ask:
How can essential urban systems be reimagined to serve people and planet, rather than profit and accumulation?
Through real-world examples, policy experimentation, and grounded community practice, the course offers both analytical tools and practical inspiration for those working to reshape cities from below and above.
If making the degrowth case was like baking a cake, disproving the plausibility of green growth would be the equivalent of turning the oven on. Decoupling is only “a myth” or “a fantasy,” some would say, a notorious fallacy that requires as much attention as the confabulations of Flat Earthers. And yet, faith in decoupling is strengthening in environmental agendas all around the world, includin...
By Christiane Kliemann When listening to all the keynotes, panels and sessions, or simply joining the lively discussions between conference participants, there is the notion of an overall agreement that a broader new vision for society and the economy is most urgently needed. However, the elephant in the room is that such vision is almost impossible to shape, if it is to represent the diversi...
For our project “Degrowth from a future perspective”, we would like to present how Erik Assadourian, Senior Fellow at the World Watch Institute, envisions a Degrowth America in 2100 and looks back to the transiton towards a truly sustainable United States. Will this have become a place where we can still have personal (electric) vehicles, [...]
