The paper argues that alternative development strategies that do what radical critics argue is necessary to avoid dangerous anthropogenic climate change lack legitimacy within political and economic elites. While these ideas are presently underdeveloped, their existence means that debates about sustainable development cannot be dismissed as uniformly post-political. But question it we must. While neoliberalism and the entrepreneurial conception of urbanism that it engenders is pervasive, and there are powerful forces that seek to marginalise dissenting voices, a diverse economies perspective would uncover a broader, less restrictive discursive terrain in which radical voices can develop alternative agendas and prefigurative examples of alternative urbanisms.
This has to be speculative — or in some eyes utopian — at this time: while cities covering twelve per cent of world population are engaging in action to avoid dangerous climate change de Moncuit, , no cities are engaged in the fundamental transformation of the metabolism of urban life that radical critics argue needs to happen.
The paper contains reflections based on research into utopian urbanisms over the past twenty years undertaken by one of us e. The paper argues that this opens up a contested political space for a progressive urban politics of resource crises and climate change that characterisations of either ecological modernisation Mol, Sonnenfeld et al.
This vision of a radical grassroots urbanism needs to be developed through the hard work of local experimentation which focuses on what could be, rather than what currently is. The postcarbon city constructed from the grassroots up could be more than a low carbon version of the current unequal, unhealthy, geographically uneven, crisis ridden neoliberal urbanisms. Further, it argues that local grassroots green urbanism is not destined to be tamed and redefined in post-political neoliberal ways, and that there are alternatives to participation at strategic levels in urban management North and Bruegel, The paradigm argues that urban economies should grow, maximizing the number of jobs and businesses that are generated, thereby increasing the welfare of citizens.
Higher wages, more businesses, higher house prices and more consumption means more economic activity and more happiness. Often the perception that capital can move if its needs are not met is enough — no threats need to be made, no often expensive and locally integrated plant dependent on local supply lines is actually uprooted and moved.
