Daring to Imagine a Different City: Exploring the Opportunities for Urban Planners to Contribute to a Degrowth Transformation

Sammanfattning

This thesis explores possibilities and challenges for urban planners to contribute to a degrowth transformation. Degrowth calls for a reduction of production and consumption, a redistribution of wealth and a shift in societal norms and values to address the current environmental crises. According to the existing literature, urban planners may be able to help advance and implement degrowth. To explore this possibility, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 17 urban planners working in eight Swedish municipalities, during which a future urban vision inspired by degrowth proposals was presented. The interviews were analysed through thematic coding and supported by an operationalised analytical framework, revealing various difficulties and opportunities. The analysis finds that planners’ operating space for transformative change is limited by the embeddedness of growth in societal structures, governance institutions, and the mindset. These structural, institutional, and cognitive conditions limit planners’ power and their ability to independently pursue transformative change alone. At the same time, the study identifies three main possibilities for planners to contribute to a degrowth transformation: (1) their influence on the physical space, (2) fostering collaboration, and (3) their knowledge and skills. The paper concludes that urban planners have opportunities to contribute to a degrowth transformation within Swedish municipalities, but their role is partial and constrained. While it remains unclear how a degrowth transformation would occur in practice, future research could further explore potential triggers for such a transformation and the role urban planners might play in it.