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This chapter briefly sketches a degrowth perspective revealing the challenge of inequities within global production for trade and flows of trade, and offers a Minority World analysis-cum-response of those implicated in an ‘imperial mode of living’ (Brand and Wissen, 2021). An Australian activist who tries to exchange this mode for a ‘solidarity mode of living’ (Brand and Wissen, 2021) is tracked, including their move to eco-collaborative housing (a key housing for degrowth strategy). Zürich’s ‘radical young housing cooperatives’ model is explored to demonstrate that accessible, affordable and ecologically sustainable best practice models of eco-collaborative housing incorporate aspects of an holistic, feminist, caring economy approach and have transformative potential to overturn the imperial mode of living, pointing towards a solidarity mode of living and caring commons. This discussion benefits from degrowth-aligned Majority World perspectives, engaging with degrowth discourses taking account of global dimensions of post-carbon inclusion.
This chapter focuses on three degrowth cases of prefigurative hybrids – Konzeptwerk Neue Ökonomie (A Laboratory for New Economic Ideas) established in Leipzig (Germany) in 2011; Cargonomia, in Budapest and its surrounds (Hungary), emerging in the early 2010s to visibly appear in mid-2015; and Haus des Wandels (House of Change or House for Transformation) started mid-2018 in Heinersdorf (rural Brandenburg) within 20 km of the German border with Poland. The chapter starts with a brief discussion of such hybrids, offers sketches of the cases and a discussion of the ethnographic approach. The chapter progresses case-by-case, identifying key characteristics of these experimental and aspirational degrowth efforts, and certain ecological sustainability achievements and challenges in realizing principles of post-carbon inclusion and commoning in mundane living. It is concluded that such prefigurative degrowth hybrids have experimental and experiential values and the potential to be scaled out, affirming their function as critical approaches within post-carbon transitions.
The climate emergency and COVID-19 have brought fresh urgency to both housing financialization and home as building blocks of societies. In westernized homeowner dominated societies, a seemingly eternal housing affordability crisis and gentrification are perennial features of policy agendas. In this context, prospects are assessed for the proliferation of inclusive housing in the post-carbon era, confronting the idea that homeownership is the only or best option, and that a growth model of economic development is the route to achieving this. The chapter forms a bridge between contemporary mainstream narratives of affordable housing and radical degrowth analyses of a prefigurative nature. Housing studies is reflected on as a diverse field, connecting normative ideas of housing as a three-part social construct – a commodity-cum-asset (homeownership, housing markets, investments and capital accumulation); housing with use values offering spaces (shelter) and services and comforts (such as climate control and locational convenience); and housing as ‘home’ where affective dimensions of dwellings connect to subjective meanings, emotions, memory and ontological security.
Inclusion is so central to the response to climate change that any response that does not place inclusion at the centre imperils the whole project and, therefore, the future of humanity. Current proposed solutions to mitigate climate change are exacerbating inequality, and feeding both misery and resistance to climate mitigation as a societal goal. While markets create the poverty and the social boundaries that imperil decarbonization, national governments protect national interests against planetary interests, inter-generational interests and inter-species interests. Post-carbon inclusion is, thus, not simply a ‘nice-to-have’ combination, rather it is a necessary agenda that supersedes decarbonization via business-as-usual processes.
The implications for post-carbon inclusion research and practice are grouped here into three entangled and overlapping elements: mapping the terrain through deeper understandings of society and practice; resetting rights and justice; and empowerment and agency. The resultant agenda provides directions for research and policy communities working in partnership in the growing field of post-carbon inclusion studies. As pointed out by movements of environmental justice, degrowth and social justice, hope lies in new forms of engagement, in new agents and actors operating in new ways.
As efforts to address the climate crisis (hopefully) continue to multiply across the urban world, two central questions are brought to the fore: first, how could these efforts be made effective and sufficient to address the climate emergency and heal the planet for future generations? Second, to what extent can effective actions also promote justice and inclusion? To address these questions, this chapter sets out four starting premises and introduces key concepts of post-carbon inclusion, set against current initiatives on ecological modernization, circular economies, just transitions, socio-technical transitions and degrowth. Decarbonization and inequality are entangled at multiple scales, whether planetary, national, regional, city, local community or house(hold). The implications and ramifications of such socio-technological entanglement matter insofar as they might reinforce each other; they might present as a Faustian bargain. For example, is the rush for minerals to feed low carbon technology unacceptably exacerbating global ecosystem decline? This chapter describes how efforts to decarbonize necessarily disrupt and reconfigure domestic and urban scale infrastructures and practices, generating new patterns of difference and marginality, as illustrated in the various chapters throughout the book.
This collection pays unique attention to the highly challenging problems of addressing inequality within decarbonisation – particularly under-explored aspects, such as high consumption, degrowth approaches and perverse outcomes.
Contributors point out means and possibilities of the transition from high carbon inequalities to post-carbon inclusion. They apply a variety of conceptual and methodological approaches in all-inclusive ways to diverse challenges, such as urban heating and retrofitting.
Richly illustrated with case studies from the city to the household, this book critically examines ‘just transitions’ to achieve sustainable societies in the future.
