Real Existing Degrowth is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the Autonomous University of Barcelona within the context of the ERC-funded project “REAL – A Post Growth Deal.” It features contributions by Donatella Gasparro, David E. Gilbert, Julia Grosinger, Giorgos Kallis, Feroz Mohamed Khan, Lucia Muñoz-Sueiro, and Angelos Varvarousis and Marula Tsagkari.
Degrowth is often imagined as a call to reduce current society’s throughput, a political slogan, or a programmatic horizon comprising policy roadmaps, models of how the global economy can function otherwise, and analyses of the politics that can bring us there. Much of its language therefore lives in the future tense. Yet degrowth is not an abstract idea, a future potential. It is a very real material, spatial, and social condition, one that exists in the present. It can be found in places where people resist growth, adapt to its end, or live well in its absence. These alternatives all take territorial form.
Territory matters because economic growth itself has a geography. It appears in new infrastructures, logistics hubs, tourist complexes, mines, plantations, data centers, apartment towers, industrial agriculture, and landscapes monofunctionally reorganized around extraction and unequal exchange. It also settles into rules, institutions, habits, and shared ideas about what counts as valuable land, a successful city, a region worth living in, or a good life. These arrangements accumulate over time. Roads invite particular kinds of mobility; zoning makes some land uses easier than others; investment reshapes expectations; infrastructures lock territories into specific forms of provisioning; everyday aspirations adjust to what has become normal. Together, material arrangements, rules, and shared ideas shape places around the pursuit of growth. Yet they can be oriented toward other ends.
Degrowth’s territorial constellations are imperfect and incomplete, entangled with markets, states, supply chains, inequalities, ecological pressures, and the wider growth-dominated world. Their trajectories are contingent and their reproduction never guaranteed. They emerge through particular socio-ecological conditions, historical accidents, conflicts, migrations, inherited institutions, and collective choices, and they can be eroded just as they can be reinforced. This is precisely what makes them valuable to study. Comparing them across histories and geographies can reveal how particular combinations of material fabrics, regulations, and imaginaries come into being; how they sustain wellbeing with relatively little resource use; how they endure pressures for homogenization; and where they begin to unravel. In this sense, degrowth can begin to develop an empirical memory: a grounded understanding of what has endured, what can travel, and what may need protection, support, or simply room to continue.