Nurturing the post-growth city: Bringing the rural back in

Abstract

This chapter proposes that a post-growth approach to urban sustainability would benefit from extending its frame beyond urban contexts and connecting to the rural sphere. Acknowledging the linkage between capitalism’s environmental destructiveness and the imposed divide between the rural and the urban, this chapter asks how the urban/rural divide and its resolution can figure in the quest for environmentally sound cities. Building on a review of various academic debates on urban sustainability, feminist and postcolonial urban studies and the diverse economies scholarship, the chapter proposes a post-growth approach to urban sustainability planning. It suggests conceptual lenses and empirical foci aimed at bringing the rural back into urban sustainability planning, which consist of four elements: (i) reading for diversity and difference; (ii) refraining from prioritizing the urban and the city; (iii) complicating the categories of the urban and the rural; and (iv) looking for performances that reconfigure the material, cultural and power relations between rural and urban. The chapter illustrates the proposal through the case of Territorios Campesinos Agroalimentarios, a Colombian peasant movement that defies the boundaries of rural and urban, nature and society, and thereby prefigures a sustainable post-growth society at the territorial level.