New Paper on Municipal Ecological Economic Planning in Barcelona

Yousaf Nishat-Botero and Matt Thompson have published a new paper titled ‘Planning in nature’s metropolis: Metabolic municipalism and ecological planning in Barcelona’ in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. The paper aims to illuminate and critically assess the elements of an ecological planning for metabolic sovereignty in conditions of planetary urbanisation. The article builds on and complements previous work by Yousaf and Matt on the organizational and eco-geographical questions of economic planning, including ‘Planning’s ecologies‘, ‘Postcapitalist Planning and Urban Revolution‘, and ‘The land question and postcapitalist countrysides: towards a town-country synthesis‘. ‘Planning in nature’s metropolis’ can be found here. If you cannot access the article please contact one of the authors. Their contact can be found on the article website.

Abstract

Democratic economic planning is emerging once again after decades of marginalisation. This article contributes to the ecological turn in the new economic planning literature by attending to new municipalist approaches to repairing metabolic rifts opened by capitalist urbanisation. It presents a qualitative study of the office of strategic planning for the Barcelona metropolitan region (PEMB) to examine how questions of social metabolism have informed its revaluation of planning, situating these changes within what we identify as an incipient ‘metabolic municipalism’. By examining how PEMB has redefined ‘the economic’ in economic planning, and how it has worked around the challenges of distributed planning without power, through public-community partnerships, we aim to illuminate and critically assess the elements of an ecological planning for metabolic sovereignty in conditions of planetary urbanisation.