Housing for Degrowth

‘Degrowth’, a type of ‘postgrowth’, is becoming a strong political, practical and cultural movement for downscaling and transforming societies beyond capitalist growth and non-capitalist productivism to achieve global sustainability and satisfy everyone’s basic needs.

This groundbreaking collection on housing for degrowth addresses key challenges of unaffordable, unsustainable and anti-social housing today, including going beyond struggles for a 'right to the city' to a 'right to metabolism', advocating refurbishment versus demolition, and revealing controversies within the degrowth movement on urbanisation, decentralisation and open localism. International case studies show how housing for degrowth is based on sufficiency and conviviality, living a ‘one planet lifestyle’ with a common ecological footprint.

This book explores environmental, cultural and economic housing and planning issues from interdisciplinary perspectives such as urbanism, ecological economics, environmental justice, housing studies and policy, planning studies and policy, sustainability studies, political ecology, social change and degrowth. It will appeal to students and scholars across a wide range of disciplines.

“"This is a splendid and very readable book on housing and urban planning for degrowth. The degrowth perspective implies a decrease in the social metabolism and an increase in communality and conviviality. There are many chapters on actual types of degrowth housing in many countries and fundamental discussions of top-down versus bottom-up urban planning leading to these objectives. This book should become a textbook for courses in architecture, and urban and rural planning."-- Joan Martinez Alier, Emeritus Professor of Economics and Economic History and Senior Researcher at ICTA, Autonomous University of Barcelona, and Co-director of the EJAtlas "Degrowth is not just a theory -- it is practice and it has policy implications. This fantastic collection of new essays shows how a degrowth mindset opens new ways of thinking alternatives and solutions to what is becoming a truly global housing crisis."-- Giorgos Kallis, ICREA Research Professor at Universitat Aut”

"This is a splendid and very readable book on housing and urban planning for degrowth. The degrowth perspective implies a decrease in the social metabolism and an increase in communality and conviviality. There are many chapters on actual types of degrowth housing in many countries and fundamental discussions of top-down versus bottom-up urban planning leading to these objectives. This book should become a textbook for courses in architecture, and urban and rural planning." — Joan Martinez Alier, Emeritus Professor of Economics and Economic History and Senior Researcher at ICTA, Autonomous University of Barcelona, and Co-director of the EJAtlas

"Degrowth is not just a theory — it is practice and it has policy implications. This fantastic collection of new essays shows how a degrowth mindset opens new ways of thinking alternatives and solutions to what is becoming a truly global housing crisis." — Giorgos Kallis, ICREA Research Professor at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and a co-editor of Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Paradigm (2014)

"This book brings together astonishingly rich views on sustainable urban development, wholly local but with a global coverage. It fits in with trends away from evermore centralised decision making for growth towards local independence. Decentralised autonomy can halt encroachment of global organisations in private life, with communal housing at its core." — Gjalt Huppes, Senior Researcher, Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML) at Leiden University, Netherlands

Anitra Nelson is an activist-scholar, Associate Professor in the Centre for Urban Research at RMIT University, Melbourne (Australia), and author and editor of several books including Small is Necessary: Shared Living on a Shared Planet (2018) and Life Without Money: Building Fair and Sustainable Economies (ed.) (2011).

François Schneider has supported degrowth since 2001. Co-founder of Research & Degrowth /) and initiator of degrowth conferences, he is associate researcher at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA), Autonomous University of Barcelona. In 2012, he started the experiential project Can Decreix, 'house of degrowth' in Catalan.

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