The Potential of Post-Growth Planning: Re-Tooling the Planning Profession for Moving beyond Growth

There has recently been a renewal of the debates that question the compatibility of the pursuit of growth with meaningful action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and unsustainable resource consumption. These debates have variously been labelled ‘degrowth’ or ‘post-growth.’ In this paper we explore the implications of these debates for the practices of planning. We focus on how the instruments and tools within planning systems may be adapted in quite radical ways for a post-growth future. While planning covers a wide range of policy domains, we concentrate our examples on two core tasks of planning for housing and infrastructure. We use these to bring out the ways that planners could address the urgent need to think and act beyond the growth agenda.