ABSTRACT
Urbanisation under capitalism proceeds through an extractivist cycle of perpetual growth that relies on dispossession and reproduces the schism between urban and rural areas. This cycle creates lock-in effects, which push governments to continue raising land values and increasing dispossession to deal with the social and ecological damages of urbanisation. This enlarges the urban ecological footprint and the demand for new socio-ecological fixes that, in turn, exacerbates the need to pursue growth. To address this process, this chapter in the Routledge Handbook of Degrowth (2025) sketches the broad strokes of a degrowth agenda for urbanisation that decouples the provision of essential urban services from the imperative to increase land values. It argues that spatial planning for degrowth needs to build on existing spatial degrowth practices to foster the political power necessary for a degrowth urban agenda.
