Like many other parts of nature, green spaces in cities are increasingly seen through the lens of how much they contribute to economic growth. This way of looking at urban green spaces follows the broader pragmatic discourse that increasingly links nature to economics and corporate interests. Many concepts have challenged the neoliberal economic agenda on environment–society–economy interactions, focusing on social and environmental justice and multiple values of nature. One concept that has grown in direct opposition to the neoliberal agenda and draws from multiple strands of criticism of the neoliberal capitalist economic paradigm is degrowth.
A new paper published in the journal Cities provides an overview of what the two extreme systems – one that emphasises economic growth and the other built on opposition to growth – mean in the context of urban green spaces. Reflecting the neoliberal model's framing of the world as economic relationships, the paper discusses urban greening in terms of production and consumption, supplemented by an overview of what this means for human–non-human relationships. Interestingly, the roles of (co-)producers and users of urban green spaces are much more connected within degrowth than within the top-down neoliberal regime.
A degrowth agenda must link to environmental justice research, including its increasingly prominent calls for an emancipatory, intersectional and relational approach, and progressive approaches to environmental conservation, such as convivial conservation. Additionally, it should align with calls for a more comprehensive approach to environmental values, in line with the suggestions of IPBES, and acknowledge the role played by informal green spaces.
This paper responds to the critique of neoliberal governance of urban green spaces by providing suggestions on how to govern them in a socially just and environmentally conscious way. It goes beyond previous attempts to discuss individual green spaces through the lens of degrowth, offering a broader degrowth agenda on urban greening. It adds to the newer wave of research on the operationalisation of degrowth, especially in an urban context, and to the scarce literature on human–non-human relationships from the perspective of degrowth. Finally, with the example of urban green spaces, this paper adds to the literature on how to liberate the management of different types of resources from the neoliberal economic mindset, following examples such as oceans or forests.
Read the paper here: here
Dr. Jakub Kronenberg (University of Lodz, Poland) is an ecological economist, who specializes in the investigation of environmental values and the institutional context of nature conservation. Jakub is currently a visiting academic in the Conservation Research Institute and the Department of Geography.