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The theory – and practice – of establishing autonomy from the hegemony of growth is central to the imaginary of degrowth. Yet to envisage pathways towards a degrowth society, scholars need to explain how autonomy coalesces into autonomous institutions. This article addresses this institutional challenge of how to secure autonomy in the provision of collective, affordable and decommodified housing in cities. Building on the tradition of autonomist and (post-)workerist thought, it conceptualises this challenge as one of maintenance. It argues that autonomy occurs through its perpetual reproduction, which is made possible by nesting and federating practices among autonomous communities. Nesting and federating practices allow these communities to avoid becoming enclaves and co-optation by market logics. The article illustrates these arguments through reference to the struggles of de Nieuwe Meent, a recent housing commoning project in Amsterdam. 摘要 从增长霸权中建立自治的理论和实践是去增长的核心。然而，为了设想走向去增长社会的道路，学者们需要研究自治如何结合成自治机构。本文探讨了如何确保城市自主提供集体的、负担得起和非商品住房这一体制挑战。基于自主主义和（后）工作主义思想的传统，它将这一挑战概念化。它认为自治是通过其永久性的再生产实现的，而这是通过自治社区之间的嵌套和联合实践实现的。筑巢和联合实践使这些社区避免成为飞地和市场逻辑的共同选择。本文通过引用de Nieuwe Meent所开展的斗争来说明这些论点，这是阿姆斯特丹最近的一个公共住房项目。

This article documents and juxtaposes two side effects of the COVID‐19 pandemic on refugee health, housing, and living conditions in Greece. First is the intensification of state‐led practices of what is increasingly known as “campisation,” hyper‐isolation, and ultimately the stigmatisation of refugee populations. Second is the intensification of refugee‐led “commoning” practices of self‐ and community care and the creation of “caringscapes” inside and outside the camps, which has produced new sociospatial connections that have challenged isolation. Documenting these interrelated processes side by side, we draw attention to two important insights. First is that the proliferation of caringscapes acts as an important, but ultimately insufficient, antidote against increased exclusion marginalisation and stigmatisation of refugees. Second is that new ethics and new forms of collective care that have emerged alongside repeated mantras about individual responsibility and social distancing can become levers to imagine a less individualistic, less divisive, and less isolated world. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Geographical Research is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Conferences are theorized as crucial sites, not only for professional development, but also for policy learning. However, little empirical evidence has examined pathways for why and how learning is realized. Using a unique case approach, this paper unravels conference learning dimensions by combining literatures of policy transfer and policy mobilities with situated learning theory. Our case was a four-day international conference on cycling, taking place in the Netherlands, a country well-known for high rates of cycling and commonly sought for advice on cycling policy. Using a questionnaire with participants (n=293) together with ethnographic fieldwork, we examine key attributes. Structure for fieldwork derived from situated learning theory, where learning is a social phenomenon embedded in sensory and spatial circumstances. Findings demonstrate that acquiring technical understanding (i.e., design specifications, sample policy language) was less prominent than the acquisition of social and experiential knowledge. Additionally, the bicycle acted as a sensorimotor transition instrument for spatial discovery, evoking emotion, and social connection. The conference represented an opportunity to convene both tacit and explicit knowledge, where an embodied experience (for example, riding a bicycle in the Netherlands) may also act as critical asset to professional development in this emerging practice. The paper adds to the debate about learning in transport policy practice by unfurling contextual mechanisms and engaging with practitioners in “their world” – an ordinary practice of attending a conference in a unique location.

Food production and consumption related environmental challenges have come to the forefront of policy discourse in the past decade. This links primarily to concerns in terms of agriculture fueling climate change, but also in terms of long-term food security and availability for growing populations. A proposed solution to these pressures at the urban scale is Vertical Farming (VF), in the understanding of this article, a high-yield form of controlled environment agriculture, staked on multiple layers, which promises to produce leafy greens and vegetables within cities, with potential to reduce the resource intensity of urban food production and consumption. The particular contextual conditions required for VF to be sustainable have not as of yet been holistically assessed. Accordingly, by analyzing these contextual conditions in the Global North, this research assesses how VF can be up-scaled for the sake of sustainability–particularly climate mitigation–by viewing urban food systems through the Multi-Level Perspective. The article presents three findings in relation to the up-scaling potential of VF. Firstly, singular VF interventions in cities should have further functions integrated at the scale of the farm for the sake of viability. Secondly, VF interventions carry the most potential for climate mitigation if they are viewed through urban-level systemic food planning, which sheds light on the contextual conditions needed for VF to contribute to sustainability. Finally, the globalized dynamics of the neoliberal political economy, and in turn the localized effects for food systems, have implications for VF that need to be taken into consideration in framing up-scaling policy.

Strategies applied by urban policy makers in order to achieve sustainable city development may be in conflict with each other because it crosses many disciplines and policy areas. This research focusses on the dilemma between compact city and urban greenspace policies and their influence on actual land-use change in Amsterdam and Brussels. These cases are selected because of their similar urban growth yet diverse policy and governance contexts. We contend that comparing how urban policies try to address this dilemma can provide a deeper understanding of how policy strategies affect land-use change. The results show that densification indeed decreases the quantity (Amsterdam: −4.7% Brussels: −11.9%), average size (A: −3.1% B: −25.6%) and connectivity of urban greenspaces. Observed land-use changes seem disconnected from purported urban greenspace policies, whereas urban development plans seem to dominate changes in greenspace quantity and form.

In this dialogue the notion of “commoning mobility” is central. Anna Nikolaeva and Jan Duffhues both work on mobility issues in the city of Amsterdam–Anna as a mobility scholar at the University of Amsterdam and Jan as an innovation strategist at the municipality of Amsterdam. Each from their own professional perspective, they see the possibility of a new way of thinking about transitioning to more sustainable and inclusive mobilities. The notion of “commoning mobility” appears to capture that new way of thinking, yet many questions are open regarding its practical application. In this dialogue they together reflect on what “commoning mobility” might mean in practice, the role of different societal actors in it, the potential pitfalls of “commoning”, and the impact of the global pandemic on our relationship with mobility.

Attempts to pursue sustainable mobility face widespread challenges. One key way of approaching these challenges is through policy transfer and policy learning; indeed, the practice of learning from elsewhere is encouraged at various levels of government. This paper contends that a better understanding of what facilitates learning through policy transfer might support further change, yet such examinations remain underdeveloped in the field of transport. This paper synthesises key concepts and factors that drive this learning process, by reviewing 65 papers on transport policy published between 2011 and 2020. Our findings testify to the growing prevalence of policy transfer research and emerging critical perspectives on the transfer and translation of global ideas. We uncover critical factors of the learning process, including settings where learning takes place, inter-actor relations, and organisational and institutional patterns. While most papers reviewed here aimed to examine learning, few employ theories to measure the concept. Consequently, one of our main conclusions is that relatively little is known about how and to what extent learning, triggered by experiences from other contexts, is actually transformed into action. Suggestions include more systematically focusing on organisational and institutional dimensions and concerted trans-disciplinary efforts to close the gap between research and practice.

Het weloverwogen en zorgvuldig geformuleerde co-referaat van professor Koppenjan heeft een zeer motiverende uitwerking gehad op mijn denken en doen. Hartelijk dank daarvoor. De vier overwegingen die professor Koppenjan meegeeft, zetten aan om mijn argumenten verder uit te werken en aan te scherpen. Dat zal ik in deze reactie per vraag doen.

Shifts in property markets are closely tied to changes in investment actors’ relations, shaped by wider economic and regulatory processes. However, the existing literature generally neglects the role of actors’ behaviour and agency within property market shifts, and how market shifts affect cities. In response, we establish a framework that systematically unpacks the role, characteristics and behaviour of property investors in investment market shifts within urban development. We consider market shifts as modifications to established economic and regulatory processes and argue that a multidimensional approach is required to understand property investors and their role within property investment markets that shapes the urban built environment. Our main contribution is a novel approach and methodology to read changing property investor landscapes by linking wider economic and regulatory changes to investment actors and their investment strategies. Empirically, we focus on Amsterdam’s changing investor landscape over the last 15 years. We investigate how crises, represented by far-reaching institutional disruptions of economic and regulatory systems, relate to Amsterdam’s landscape of property investors. Correspondingly, we define three distinct periods of analysis, based on transaction volumes and regulatory interventions at national and local levels: the pre-global financial crisis (GFC) period from 2005 to 2008, the post-GFC recovery period from 2009 to 2013, and the pre-Covid19 boom period from 2014 to 2020. We reveal how Amsterdam’s investor landscape changed over the course of these periods through a mixed methods analysis, including quantitative investment transaction analysis, mapping, and in-depth interviews with investors. We ultimately suggest that reading property market shifts through multidimensional characteristics would enable more targeted policy solutions, moving away from empirically ill-supported stereotypes of property actor behaviours.

While the entrepreneurialisation of local administrations is widely acknowledged, the extent and format of institutional and organisational structures that accompany market-oriented ideological shifts and transitions in urban governance often remain unnoticed. This article provides an original theoretical argument and frame of analysis to forensically study the underlying infrastructures of entrepreneurial governance systems. We argue that complex institutional and organisational arrangements in market-oriented urban development can be comprehended through fragmented governance architectures, a conceptual perspective that we borrowed from governance studies and operationalised in relation to property development. We illustrate the application of the framework by examining entrepreneurial transformations in Amsterdam’s residential property production. Based on rich empirical evidence, including discourse analysis, policy analysis and in-depth interviews with key policy and property industry actors, we illuminate divergent public-sector regulation of market activities, intra-organisational discrepancies, and fuzzy narratives in policy interventions which are tied to specific spatial interventions mushrooming in the city. Uncoordinated and sometimes contradictory institutional ties link public and private actors in these property production processes, forming a complex and chaotic landscape of regulations, actors, and relations. This fragmentation, we posit, warrants recognition as it lies at the heart of scattered investments in the urban built environment.

Creating climate-proof cities typically comes with institutional barriers between public and private parties. Therefore, local governments are increasingly establishing local climate adaptation networks through which collective knowledge and action can be developed. We aim to understand how these networks can initiate institutional change that enables a climate-proof city. To this end, we theorize that boundary objects – either conceptual or material artifacts – that allow different groups to work together without consensus are important instruments of institutional work strategies that aim to change or disrupt established institutional structures. Our case study of Amsterdam Rainproof in the Netherlands, a frontrunner in urban climate networks, shows that shared concepts and models developed in city networks seem to primarily contribute to capacity building (generating interdisciplinary knowledge about a climate-proof city), agenda-setting (underscoring the urgency of climate adaptation), and the creation of new normative identities (climate adaptation as the joint responsibility of urban actors). Accordingly, boundary objects in the case study transform the cultural-cognitive and normative pillars of institutions, while the regulative pillar (enforcement and sanctioning) is more difficult to change. Altogether, our case study analysis suggests that local climate adaptation networks might not result in a climate-proof city in the short term but can provide a better breeding ground for climate-proofing cities in the long run.

In this think piece I will take you on a journey to share my approach to reading contemporary city building, which is increasingly chaotic, fragmented, and complex. Spatial governance, in my understanding, refers to the collective efforts to coordinate and structure the dynamic institutional activities of a variety of actors that aim to organise the built environment. Urban planning is one of these efforts, though not the only one. Therefore, in this article, I will visualise spatial governance as a dynamic landscape which accommodates multi-actor, multi-scalar, multi-loci and multi-temporal regulatory activities related to the uncertainties, opportunities, and crises of the market. Reading dynamic landscapes of spatial governance requires an understanding of regulatory efforts as they refer to the relational behaviour of state, market, and community actors. This approach, to linking regulatory efforts to relational behaviour, in my view, gives us new opportunities to provide comprehensive understandings of how cities develop under market-driven conditions.

Urban political ecology (UPE) focuses on unsettling traditional understandings of ‘cities’ as ontological entities separate from ‘nature’ and on how the production of settlements is metabolically linked with flows of capital and more-than-human ecological processes. The contribution of this paper is to recalibrate UPE to new urban forms and processes of extended urbanization. This exploration goes against the reduction of what goes on outside of cities to processes that emanate unidirectionally from cities. Acknowledging UPE’s rich intellectual history and aiming to enrich rather than split the field, this paper identifies four emerging discourses that go beyond UPE’s original formulation.

The article explores the extent to which the pressure to upscale grassroot planning initiatives can lead to the loss of their innovative potential. We advocate for the need to acknowledge the differentiated demands between community-involving pilot initiatives and grassroots initiatives when it comes to upscaling and argue that upscaling grassroots initiatives without loss of innovation takes more than just considering large-scale implementation right at the beginning of the initiative. Grounding our research on a grassroot artists and community initiative to transform a public space into an ‘Anthropocene Forest’ in Amsterdam, we show how current practices for scaling up grassroot initiatives are often more concerned with making grassroot actors and practices fit into existing planning institutions and practices, and less concerned with learning and reforming existing institutional practices. We contend that this currently dominant institutional approach to scaling up leads to a double loss: a loss of innovative characteristics of the grassroots initiatives themselves; and a loss of opportunities to imbue existing planning practices and institutions with new ideas and know-hows. The article explores potential ways out of this conundrum.

This article examines how the political economy of waste utility services is changing in response to circular economy programs. It focuses on the financial composition, economic position and geography of three sectors: waste recycling, incineration, and urban waste reuse. Building on an empirical analysis of these sectors in the Netherlands, specifically the Amsterdam city-region, it puts forward three key arguments. First, waste recovery corporations are becoming increasingly global and dependent on steady flows of waste. Second, incineration facilities play a central yet uncertain role in planning for the circular economy. Third, the circular economy is driving an emerging material reuse market in cities. The paper concludes by arguing that ongoing changes in waste markets run the risk of making (circular) economies even more dependent on wasteful consumption and production.

Decrease of children’s independent mobility (CIM) has worried academics, policymakers, educators and other professionals for decades. Research and policy often emphasise that promoting children’s physically active and independent transport modes as cycling is important to achieve better public health, solve environmental challenges and increase related economic benefits. Yet, cycling promotion is not a neutral process and all promotion efforts are derived from latent notions of ‘cyclists’ and ‘cycling’. This paper discusses different rationalities of childhood cycling promotion and the representations of ‘children’ as independent ‘cyclists’ they entail. We argue that in order to efficiently promote cycling across contexts, we should better understand children’s cycling experiences and meanings they ascribe to it and how their mobilities emergence in the flux of social, institutional and political relations. By applying action research to a local cycling promotion project in Finland we explore how instrumental, functional and alternative rationalities emerged and resulted in differing representations of children as cyclists. While all rationalities played a role in different stages of the project, the results highlight that alternative rationalities as children’s autonomy, positive emotions and friendships were considered the most important drivers of new cycling practices among project participants. In conclusion we propose children’s autonomous mobility as the most appropriate term to depict their cycling and other self-imposed (but relational) mobility practices. peerReviewed

Over the years, cities have figured as exemplary places for neoliberal urban policies which tend to appropriate the right to the city through city-branding policies. However, as this article demonstrates, there are important claims of the right to the city raised by newly arrived refugees in the city of Athens. Although most refugees reside in overcrowded state-run camps on the outskirts of the city, there are many cases in which refugees enact the production of collective common spaces, occupying abandoned buildings in the urban core and claiming the right to the centre of the city. In this context and following the Lefebvrian notion of the right to the city and the spatial analysis on commons and enclosures, we explore the actions of refugees, and the way they engage in commoning practices that not only strive against the official state policies, but also often contest city-branding policies. In particular, we focus on the area of Exarcheia in Athens, which is an emblematic case of the conflicted nexus between investors’ and refugees’ right to the city.

Self-organisation in environmental service delivery is increasingly being promoted as an alternative to centralised service delivery. This article argues that self-organised environmental service delivery must be understood in the context of legal rules, especially environmental legislation. The article’s aim is twofold: first, to understand the changing relationship between the government and citizens in self-organised service delivery, and second, to explore how self-organised environmental service delivery complies with environmental quality requirements stipulated in legislation. The empirical study focuses on wastewater management in Oosterwold, the largest Dutch urban development that experimented with self-organisation. The results show that while individual wastewater management was prioritised and implemented at scale, the applicable legal rules were not adequately considered and integrated. Consequently, the experiment led to a deterioration of water quality. The article concludes that the success or failure of self-organisation in delivering environmental services such as wastewater management critically hinges on ensuring compliance with environmental legislation.

Responsibilities are a central matter of concern of environmental politics because they underpin regulatory frameworks of utility services. Yet, in scholarship concerned with sustainability transitions and governance, responsibility is reductively understood as a legal obligation or allotted task. Building on an institutionalist perspective, this paper conceptualized responsibility as a field of contention where actors negotiate, contest, and articulate what we define as subjectivist and collectivist responsibilities. Defining and using the concept of ‘fields of responsibility’, the paper analyzes how responsibilities (mis)match and contradict in controversial policymaking around the ‘circular economy’: a wide policy program for restructuring water, energy, and waste utility services and infrastructures in Amsterdam region. In so doing, it reveals the logic of contemporary environmental governance: in approaching climate targets, actors actively take on responsibilities while at the same time maintaining a conservative view of their role and responsibilities. We call these phenomena over-stretching and under-reaching.

During the recent refugee crisis and following the common statement-agreement between the European Union and Turkey (18 March 2016), more than half a million refugees have been trapped in Istanbul. Although the vast majority is living in remote areas in the perimeter of the city, there is a remarkable exception in the central neighborhood of Tarlabaşı. Over the decades, this area has become a shelter for newcomers from eastern Turkey and, recently, for thousands of refugees from the Middle East and Africa. In this neighborhood, refugees with the support of local and international solidarity groups establish communal houses, social centers, and collective kitchens, creating an example of commoning practices, mutual help, and transnational togetherness in the urban core. At the same time, over the past few years, Tarlabaşı has been the target of gentrification policies that aim to dislocate poor residents and refugees and to transform the area into a highincome residential area and a tourist destination. Thus, ongoing urban conflict is taking place for the right to the center of the city. This article follows the Lefebvrian concept of ‘the right to the city’ and Soja’s and Harvey’s notion of ‘spatial justice,’ taking also into account the discussion on the spatialities of ‘urban commons’ and ‘enclosures.’ It combines spatial analysis, participatory observation, and ethnographic research, and its main findings concern the refugees’ daily efforts against social segregation and exclusion shaped by commoning practices for spatial justice, visibility, and the right to the center of the city.

Cargo bikes—bicycles made to carry both goods and people—are becoming increasingly common as an alternative to automobiles in urban areas. With a wider and heavier body, cargo bikes often face problems even in the presence of cycling infrastructure, thus limiting their possibilities of route choice. Infrastructure quality and the route choices of cyclists have been well studied, but often solely based on a quantitative approach, leading to tools such as BLOS (bicycle level of service). With various designs of cargo bikes being used for a wide range of purposes, the route choice of cargo bike users is difficult to generalize. This study combines quantitative and qualitative approaches in order to explore what is important for cargo bike users’ route choice, and how this knowledge can be effectively used for planning. Our results suggest that while some general preferences exist, route choice involves complex dynamics that cannot be fully explained by quantitative measures alone: in addition to understanding “what” is important for cargo bike users, we need to understand “why” it is important. Furthermore, route choice is also influenced by the city context, making a study tailored to the local context essential.

This paper investigates the aspirations and strategies of self-builders of owner-occupied homes in a facilitated self-build scheme. It draws on a qualitative case-study of the Homeruskwartier in Almere, the Netherlands, one the largest assisted self-build schemes in present-day Europe, which caters to lower- and middle-income households. The study problematizes the notion that self-building necessarily leads to the pursuit of use values over exchange values. This questions the positive benefits attributed to self-building. The aspirations of self-builders are not only framed by social and material conditions, but are also being reframed in the action process. The paper stresses the contingent nature of aspirations and strategies and emphasizes the experimental nature of the self-building process.

Although place-specific social norms play at least as important a role as physical factors in encouraging cycling in mature cycling cities, few studies have explored these factors in detail. In order to address this research gap, this paper offers a qualitative exploration of what makes Amsterdam a “cycling city”. Through semi-structured interviews, the article explores the main factors which encourage cycling uptake among international newcomers to Amsterdam. Instead of relying on a division between “hard” and “soft” factors, we approach the city as a sociotechnical system, arguing that the material and social factors which encourage cycling in Amsterdam are co-constitutive. We identify seven main factors encouraging cycling, whichtend to be mutually reinforcing and highlight the critical role of the “human infrastructure” formed by cyclists themselves in encouraging cycling. Finally, our analysis uncovers a temporal dimension of cycling uptake, showing that many newcomers become increasingly reliant on cycling over time.

In major cities across the world policy-makers are searching for new ways to represent and govern their increasingly diverse populations. In this paper we analyse the ways in which authorities in two global cities, London and Toronto, have drawn on corporate, public management, strategies as their principal mode of diversity governance. In both we see a shift in policy making as a conscious attempt to reframe and re-imagine cities as corporate-like structures that can be conceptualised, represented, and managed through the lens of diversity management. In both cities specific representations of the city and its populations are curated to fulfil wider policy objectives. City governments present both as iconic centres of diversity, super-diversity or hyper-diversity, that embody and represent an era of progressive globalisation and new forms of contemporary cosmopolitan living. The presence of diversity is celebrated and seen a key component of ‘success agendas’. This paper is based on empirical evidence derived from a policy-oriented research project in both cities. Policy analysis and critical discourse analysis are conducted in both cities on the basis of review of policy documents at national, local and community scales, and interviews with policy makers. The paper first frames diversity as a technology of description, where we explain how diversity has become a curation strategy in public management within the framework of growing mobility of management frameworks and shifts in framing diversity in urban policies. We will then provide a comparative analysis of London and Toronto.

Literature on sustainability transitions advocates the institutionalisation of niche innovations and assigns an important role for institutional work in this respect. Previous work has conceptually and empirically substantiated a range of strategies that institutional entrepreneurs perform. However, little is known about how institutional entrepreneurs engage differently in institutional strategies across different dynamic niche contexts. We distinguish between four different niche contexts: market-based niche development, market-based regime transformation, community-based niche development and community-based regime transformation. This typology is then conceptually combined with theory on institutional entrepreneurship and institutional work to examine the diverse agential processes of institutional change through which actors shape and transform their institutional environments. The usefulness of this framework is explored in an analysis of the low-carbon building stock in the Netherlands. The analysis demonstrates that the framework offers a comprehensive approach to examine variety in the arsenal of strategies of institutional work across different contexts.

Theoretically, transit-oriented development (TOD) can enhance accessibility by providing a relatively high level of transport connections and high-density, mixed-use, cycling- and pedestrian-friendly land use around transit stations. Empirically, there is a noted positive relationship between the transport component of TOD and accessibility, but the evidence is more mixed with respect to components other than transport (e.g., high urban density and diversity, or proximity of land uses to the transport node). In order to examine how the specific components of TOD are related to accessibility and the relative importance of each component to enhance accessibility, the paper develops a methodology to explore the relationship between each TOD component and accessibility, and applies it to Beijing, China. First, the paper assesses the accessibility of metro station areas in Beijing. Second, it studies how TOD components are related to accessibility at the one-hour travel time catchment level. The results highlight that, in the Beijing context, both a station area’s location relative to the city center and the land use pattern (e.g., a relatively lower average residential density; a relatively higher average all-job density; a relatively lower average job density in the sector of retail, accommodation, and catering; a relatively higher average job density in the sector of education, health, and culture; and a relatively lower average degree of functional mixes) around all the stations within the targeted station’s one-hour travel catchment are relatively more important to enhance the area’s accessibility than improving the area’s transit performance. This outcome provides insights for developing area-specific and targeted strategies to enhance the accessibility of a given metro station area in Beijing.

This book draws on a wide range of conceptual and empirical materials to identify and examine planning and policy approaches that move beyond the imperative of perpetual economic growth. It sketches out a path towards planning theories and practices that can break the cyclical process of urban expansion, crises, and recovery that negatively affect ecosystems and human lives.To reduce the dramatic social and environmental impact of urbanization, this book offers both a critique of growth-led urban development and a prefiguration of ecologically regenerative and socially just ways of organizing cities and regions. It uncovers emerging possibilities for post-growth planning in the fields of collective housing, mobility, urban commoning, ecological land-use, urban–rural symbiosis, and alternative planning worldviews. It provides a toolkit of concepts and real-life examples for urban scholars, urbanists, activists, architects, and designers seeking to make cities prosper within planetary boundaries.This book speaks to both experts and beginners in post-growth thinking. It concludes with a manifesto and glossary of key terms for urban scholars, students, and practitioners.

In contemporary modern societies economic growth is strongly correlated with mobility growth, and mobility growth is strongly correlated with unsustainable environmental and social impacts. The sustainable mobility approach has attempted to weaken both these links by trying on one side to make economic growth less dependent on mobility growth, and on the other side to make mobility less environmentally and socially harmful. However, and despite 30 years of efforts, the success of this balancing act has been at best mixed and is plainly insufficient. This chapter argues that it is time to try an altogether different approach, and question instead the link between mobility growth and human welfare and well-being. The chapter sees the current pandemic as triggering a unique natural experiment allowing this exploration and asks what insights it might give about a world where increases of individual well-being are independent of mobility growth.

In response to acute urban mobility and livability challenges, city street experiments have emerged as a way to explore possible solutions for alternative futures. While the added value of these experiments to improve urban living conditions is widely acknowledged, their potential to stimulate larger system change remains unknown. This paper uses the defining characteristics of transition experiments and a multi-level perspective of transitions in order to assess the transitional capacity of city street experiments. We devise an assessment framework to systematically assess six case studies in Amsterdam and Munich, revealing emerging patterns of experimentation within urban mobility systems.

From a degrowth perspective, housing is not a commodity but an essential social good. Through commoning, housing creates spaces of living with physical, social and ecological dimensions that are free from market competition. Yet, in current economic systems, housing commons are permanently threatened by market co-optation or marginalisation. Under these conditions, the issue of how autonomy in housing provision can be maintained becomes crucial. The chapter addresses this challenge by exploring the institutional architecture of a housing cooperative built upon degrowth ideals. It develops an analytical compass of four rights, which underlie a collective, self-managed and democratic way of life: commissioning, management, inclusion and income rights. Even though these rights can be configured in any housing tenure or form, we contend that they institute autonomous housing only when they are ‘collectivised’ – that is, when the property regime is dispersed and disputable. We show how these rights are articulated in practice by looking at a concrete case of a housing cooperative in Amsterdam: de Nieuwe Meent.

The pressing nature of the climate crisis is placing sub-national action at the forefront of climate mitigation. Energy communities have been an example of such niche action, as, over the past decades, they have blossomed in number and have challenged dominant narratives of the energy transition. The aggregate impact such action promises may be necessary to mitigate the global-scale problem of the climate crisis. This opens up the vexing question of what mechanisms are at play in scaling such action and how the contours of causality may be painted in the pathways towards transitions. This article aims to address this gap by building on the concept of mechanismic thinking. The innovative nature of this approach helps us identify empirical examples of conditions of scaling and brings conceptual clarity to studying processes of transitions. This article identifies conditions in relation to various pathways of transitions and the strategic management of niches. We identify several conditions that scaling may depend on through a systematic literature review of the energy community literature. From our review, two key results surface: Firstly, at the empirical level, the conditions identified suggest that a diversity of pathways to scaling may exist in parallel. Secondly, the conditions found in the literature can productively be mapped based on three dimensions: conditions internal to communities, conditions affecting interactions between communities, and finally, conditions related to the context of community initiatives. By feeding back our findings into leading theories in the field, our review enriches existing accounts of niche-internal dynamics of the strategic niche management approach. Moreover, we suggest that mechanismic thinking has much to add to the research agenda on connecting local scale innovation and higher scale impact in socio-technical thinking.

This chapter focuses on how the environment was mobilised in subaltern struggles against the normalisation of austerity and ‘neoliberal natures’ during and after the 2008 economic crisis in Greece. We ground our analysis on three grassroots environmental movements that emerged as a response to austerity measures: the national ‘no-middlemen’ solidarity food distribution network (2012-2015); the local anti-mining movement in Halkidiki, northern Greece (2011 onwards); and the national movement against new onshore and offshore hydrocarbon explorations (2015 onwards). Using a Gramscian political ecology framework, our analysis shows that by reciprocally combining anti-austerity politics and alternative ways of understanding and mobilizing ‘environmental’ discourses, all three movements successfully challenged the reproduction of uneven society environment relations that had been exacerbated by the austerity agenda and the intensification of neoliberal practices in the country.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book documents austerity as an idea and a practice that is as dangerous for theenvironment, as it is for the economy and for society. It explores how austerity led to environmental degradation, land grabbing, and theprivate appropriation of the commons, affecting the subaltern classes and socialgroups. The book focuses on the bushfires disaster in 2019 in Australia, also known as the ‘Black Summer’, to examine how austerity measures have combined with economic growth based on fossil fuels industry, denial of climate change, and colonialism to exacerbate climate-related disasters and the country’s unpreparedness to face them. It addresses the rise of environmental conflict in the context of austerity and how the environment informs anti-austerity struggles and mobilizations.

With their eyes set on a post-growth world, planners and policymakers, people and organisations shall promote: Approaches to dwelling that cease being environmentally destructive and sources of lifelong financial debt for isolated individuals and fragmented communities; Integrated approaches to transport, land use, and patterns of activity in which mobility ceases to be provided by environmentally destructive machines that constrain human beings and predetermine what or whom they need or aspire to reach; Approaches to urban governance that cease to fetishise private property as an inevitable right and are no longer dominated by standardised State bureaucracies; Planning regulations that cease to facilitate land development and ever-increasing land values as the key solutions to urban problems; Urban metabolisms that cease to be ravenous recipients of resources and predatory fabricators of carbon emissions, pollution, and waste; A societal ethic no longer dominated by competitive collaboration and individualism, extractivism and anthropocentrism.

The coronavirus’ toll on millions of human lives could not have been moredirectly felt or more widely mediatised. The 2008 economic crisis’ toll on millionsof human lives was equally high, but it was far less mediatised and less direct. The 2020 WorldBank’s forecast expected the global economy to shrink by 5.2% due to the pandemic. The political ecology approach to the environmental impacts of austerity presented inthis volume highlights the multifaceted links between economic crisis and theenvironment by exposing the crucial role of political processes and power relationsin shaping socio-natural and spatial relations that reproduce inequalities. Gaininginsight on how socially and environmentally destructive austerity has been for humansand more than humans can inform policies and practices in reshaping a moreequalitarian world.

A form of housing commons that is maintained through dispersed and disputable property rights. Commoning is a political practice of keeping housing out of the speculative real-estate market, which leads to the over accumulation of properties. It involves a community of dwellers collectivizing property. Together, they manage, own, and organize the estate on which they live by way of intense democratic engagement and solidarity. In current growth-dependent economies, the challenge facing autonomous housing is that of maintaining autonomy against the constant threats of state co-optation, commodification, and internal enclaving. The dispersal and disputability of property rights is a condition for the protection of housing commons against these risks. Being skills are the capacities and attitudes of planners that make planning action possible. Planning has long been associated with managing urban growth and associated urban development. The concept of the rural/urban divide illuminates a certain disconnection between urban and rural livelihoods in terms of economic, social, cultural, and political realities.

The viability of existing planning instruments is dependent on the maintenance of ceaseless urban economic growth. This dependency is deeply established in the historical roots of planning and has eroded the capacity of planners to address the challenges of socio-ecological justice we face today. How can planning be emancipated from the alleged imperative of growth? Which approaches and toolkits can planners mobilise to promote a mode of urban development that is geared to well-being, equality, and ecological equilibrium? With the ultimate goal of contributing to answering these questions, this introduction critically explores the main challenges of, and some possible pathways towards, a post-growth planning theory and practice. It presents some fundamental insights of post-growth thinking; and reflects on the key areas in which these insights can be actively used by planners: housing, transport and mobility, governance, regulations, food and resource provision, and planning worldviews and ethics. These areas organise the structure of this book.

The combined use of the bicycle and the train in the Netherlands has risen steadily over the past decade. However, little is yet known about the underlying processes driving the growth of bike–train use in the Netherlands. Are new bike–train trips replacing car trips, or are they primarily an extension of existing train travel and cycling practices? The present study investigates this question by exploring the main trajectories of bike–train uptake in the Randstad area. Following a mobility biographies approach, our study seeks to identify the triggers or “key events” which lead to the uptake of bike–train use, and explores their relationship with existing travel behaviour. To this end, we carried out an online survey aimed at people who started commuting regularly by bike–train. Our results show that trajectories of uptake are varied, with a similar proportion of respondents starting to commute by bike–train in order to replace cycling, driving and public transport. While in some cases people shifted to bike–train on their existing commuting trip, most respondents started travelling by bike–train following a change in work or residential location. Overall, our findings suggest that most people do not start commuting by bike–train out of particular preference, but merely because they consider it provides the best available option. Nevertheless, the large proportion of respondents with access to a car suggests that the bike–train system is able to provide an attractive alternative to car-based interurban mobility.

The Political Ecology of Austerity explores the environmental dimension of austerity that has thus far escaped academic, policy, and media attention.Offering a better comprehension of the full socio-environmental impact of austerity measures, the book highlights the importance of considering environmental issues when designing responses to economic crisis in the future. Mobilising detailed case studies from across the world, the volume documents the ways in which austerity impacts global and local ecologies, shapes environmental conficts and gives rise to new forms and practices of social moblisation and resistance. Bringing together theoretical debates and rigorous case studies, the book proposes ‘the political ecology of austerity’ as an appropriate method of analysis that can inform our understanding of the shift in environmental protection policies and the intensifcation of growth practices (green or otherwise) that followed the 2008 global economic crisis. The Political Ecology of Austerity discloses austerity to be a globalised set of tools not only for budgetary discipline, but also for socio-environmental discipline that justifes the continuation of capital accumulation at the expense of further global environmental degradation.This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of social and political sciences, environmental studies, urban studies, and political ecology.

Over the last decade, degrowth has offered a concrete alternative to eco-modernization, projecting a society emancipated from the environmentally destructive imperative of competition and consumption. Urban development is the motor of economic growth; cities are therefore prime sites of intervention for degrowth activists. Nevertheless, the planning processes that drive urban development have yet to be questioned from a degrowth perspective. To clear a path for a degrowth urban agenda, this paper rethinks the institutions governing urban development in growth-dependent contemporary economies. It starts by problematizing the regional territorialization of economic competition, ideology of land scarcity, and institution of zoned property rights, which together make urban development an engine of growth. It then outlines three transitions toward urban degrowth, arguing for a regional imaginary of polycentric autonomism, a paradigm of finity in development, and care for habitability as principle of spatial organization.

Cycling is increasingly seen as a solution to a large variety of urban problems, and as such continues to inspire innovations that aim to upscale cycling to unprecedented levels. Taken to the extreme, these ideas promise a future ‘Velotopia’ in which cycling constitutes a dominant or single mobility mode. Focusing its attention on Dutch cycling innovations and two recently envisaged cycling utopias by Steven Fleming and Cosmin Popan, the present paper offers a critical exploration of current velotopian urban imaginaries. It does so by tracing their ideological ancestry back to two visionary urban designs of the 20th century: the dense city of speed and efficiency of Le Corbusier, and the endless Babylon of Constant where mobility is a means of discovery, play and human interaction. Our analysis shows that both Corbusian and Constantian understandings of mobility are reflected in current velotopian imaginaries, not only in opposition but also in combination with each other. This combination of Corbusian and Constantian velotopian imaginaries, we suggest, has largely become part of mainstream urban discourses instead of providing a radical alternative to them.

During the recent refugee crisis, numerous solidarity initiatives emerged in Greece and especially in Mytilene, Athens and Thessaloniki. Mytilene is the capital of Lesvos Island and the main entry point in the East Aegean Sea, Athens is the main refugee transit city and Thessaloniki is the biggest city close to the northern borders. After the EU–Turkey Common Statement, the Balkan countries sealed their borders and thousands of refugees found themselves stranded in Greece. The State accommodation policy provides the majority of the refugee population with residency in inappropriate camps which are mainly located in isolated old military bases and abandoned factories. The article contrasts the State-run services to the solidarity acts of “care-tizenship” and commoning practices such as self-organised refugee housing projects, which claim the right to the city and to spatial justice. Specifically, the article is inspired by the Lefebvrian “right to the city,” which embraces the right to housing, education, work, health and challenges the concept of citizen. Echoing Lefebvrian analysis, citizenship is not demarcated by membership in a nation-state, rather, it concerns all the residents of the city. The article discusses the academic literature on critical citizenship studies and especially the so-called “care-tizenship,” meaning the grassroots commoning practices that are based on caring relationships and mutual help for social rights. Following participatory ethnographic research, the main findings highlight that the acts of care-tizenship have opened up new possibilities to challenge State migration policies while reinventing a culture of togetherness and negotiating locals’ and refugees’ multiple class, gender, and religious identities.

Conventional wisdom holds that the circular economy will provide a sustainable pathway to economic growth. Advocates of circularity insist that maintaining economic growth, while simultaneously reducing both inputs of materials and outputs of waste, entails closing material streams in cities. This article examines the roots and legacy of these prescriptions in environmental policymaking. It argues that the circular economy represents a regime of eco-accumulation in which waste is main resource of production and consumption. Focusing on the legacy of circular economy policies in the Netherlands and Amsterdam, the article provides an account of the building of a nationwide green-growth urban agenda underpinned by the valorization of waste. It dissects three social, economic, and institutional processes and factors through which circularity takes shape: (a) the reconfiguration of the multi-level structure through which waste processing has been governed; (b) the promotion of a city-regional economy of micro-logistics and industrial manufacturing for waste materials; and (c) the centrality of households in producing and consuming waste in the urban environment. The article concludes by questioning the limits of an economy dependent on waste.

In recent academic and urban policy writings the term urban diversity is usually understood, or discussed within the context of, increasing ‘socio-cultural’ diversity in cities or is explicitly connected to debates over immigration and demographic change. Although policy agendas follow certain common trends ‘to deal with’ the consequences of diversity, there is a lack of evidence-based research on how representations of diversity are mobilised and implemented by institutions of governance operating at multiple scales and how these narratives relate to each other. Policy-makers are faced with new dilemmas over how to govern and manage cities that are becoming increasingly diverse, on the one hand, and increasingly ‘sensitive’ to certain channels of flows of people (such as refugees), on the other. In some cases, city authorities promote the idea of inclusive diversity as a mark of modernisation and tolerance. In others, its recognition may be seen as a threat to an imagined social order and is perceived to be fuelling neo-assimilationist policies in many European Union cities. This special issue aims to fill this gap by providing evidence-based research outcomes that tackle different dimensions of the governance of diversity in cities. The principal aim of the research project, named DIVERCITIES, that underpins this collection was to critically assess evidence concerning the range of socio-economic outcomes that may emerge from the presence of greater urban diversity. DIVERCITIES has shown that city policy agendas across Europe are often more ‘positive’ towards diversity than national policies and media reports. Moreover, local policy initiatives, mostly formed at the bottom-up scale, sometimes as a cooperation between state and civic actors and sometimes as purely private or even individual arrangements, address the actual needs of certain population groups by acting as bridge-builders between public authorities and target groups. This collection aims to provide a clear understanding of how diversity is understood, operationalised and dealt with at different scales of policy-making. In focusing on European examples, it provides an important addition to a literature that has become Anglo-American focused, both in terms of the concepts and policy interventions.

This paper is an exploration into whether public space users performing different activities describe their auditory environments in noticeably different ways. Building on soundscape and psycholinguistic literature, a questionnaire study was conducted in a large park in Amsterdam (NL), where 92 park users described, in writing, their activities and auditory environments. Users' self-reported activities were categorized based on their level of social interaction (solitary vs. socially interactive), and using open coding, generating categories of activities grouped by semantic range. The written corpus on auditory environment descriptions was analysed through a proposed classificatory framework, coding descriptions at three semantic and one syntactic level. We preliminarily tested whether there are associations between various categories of activities and of auditory environment descriptions, categorized at different levels. Our results suggest that, while for detailed levels of activity categorization there were no non-distinct patterns, the level of social interaction of users' activities has an observable effect over users' descriptions of their auditory environments. This holds particularly in relation to types of sounds listed, as well as for differences in descriptions at a syntactic level. These findings point towards subtly diff erent auditory experiences in the same public space for users performing solitary or socially interactive activities.

Contemporary urban planning dynamics are based on negotiation and contractual relations, creating fragmented planning processes. On the one hand, they trigger technocratic forms of governance, which require the ‘legal instrumentalisation’ of planning in a piecemeal approach ensuring legal certainty. On the other hand, these processes require flexibility to enable easy, fast and efficient forms of implementation due to the increasing involvement of private sector actors in urban development. This article unravels the influence of these conflicting dynamics on the fundamentals of urban planning practices by focusing on changing public accountability mechanisms created through contractual relationships between public and private sector agencies. Dutch urban regeneration has demonstrated changing governance principles and dynamics in the last three decades. Representing instrumental and institutional measures, we connect accountability mechanisms to these changes and argue that they ‘co-exist’ in multiple forms across different contexts. This article embeds this evolution in wider theoretical discussions on the changing relationships between public and private sector actors in urban governance relative to the changing role of the state, and it addresses questions on who can be held accountable, and to what extent, when public sector actors are increasingly retreating from regulatory practices while private sector actors play increasingly prominent roles.

The article exposes attacks on infrastructures of social reproduction as a prime gentrification strategy, but also as an effective focal point for community resistance. We exemplify this through the conflict over Ancoats Dispensary, a Victorian hospital at the heart of one of the UK's most deprived communities in East Manchester, which faced demolition following the 2000 New Islington Regeneration Plan. Using ethnographic and archival data we show how 200 years of community struggles for healthcare became catalytic for establishing Ancoats’ working class identity and how Ancoats Dispensary became the spatial/material and symbolic infrastructure for community continuity. The building's socially embedded history became key for articulating anti‐gentrification struggles as its planned demolition was seen as a symbolic demolition of the community itself. Local citizens formed the Ancoats Dispensary Trust and utilised tactics from historical struggles and entrepreneurial strategies to envision an alternative future in the defence of social reproduction infrastructures.