Track 15 ECONOMICS

Track chairs: Agnes Bastin, Federico Savini, Tara Ob de Beek

Planning can operate within, for and against existing economies. Planning can sustain existing economies. However, it also actively organises the spatial conditions for emerging economic paradigms and can contest existing economies to expose their socio-spatial and environmental contradictions. This track invites contributions that engage with one or more of these relations between planning and economies. It moves beyond the idea that planning only supports existing development paths in cities and regions. Instead, it views planning as active engagement with and against the economic conditions of current environmental and social challenges. 

The climate crisis, economic inequality, and resource depletion pose mounting challenges, prompting a re-evaluation of conventional growth-driven development models and their ability to serve the common good. The near future will see shifts in global economic chains, increased raw-material scarcity, geopolitical instability, and dramatic climate-related events that will disrupt existing urban and regional economies. To address these challenges, planners across government, private, and civic sectors must rethink their role and experiment with different economic paradigms. These include the EU’s Green Deal, circular economy, subsistence and sufficiency economies, postgrowth, degrowth, doughnut and foundational economics, wellbeing economics, regenerative and bioregional economics. These approaches, and many more, promise to reduce environmental footprints beyond mainstream efficiency-oriented measures. 

The track welcomes critical contributions that engage with these paradigms, their limits and implications for planning. It invites contributions in the broad arena of economics of planning ranging from the evaluation of the efficiency and effects of land policy interventions to explorations of planning under the ‘so-called’ post-growth economy paradigm and its related concepts. It solicits critical contributions from potentially integrated perspectives in urban and regional planning, political ecology, political economy and critical environmental studies to examine and contrast conventional economic development with post-capitalist futures, incorporating innovative critiques of the society-nature divide and drawing on novel interpretations of the rift between the economy and the environment. 

Keywords: Economic(s) of planning and land development; circular economy; alternative economic models; post-growth planning; degrowth