Online Workshop, Wednesday 27 March, 5pm GMT / 6pm CET

Speakers

Matthew Thompson is a Lecturer in Urban Studies at the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London. He works at the intersection of theory, policy and practice and his research interests include critical urban political economy, urban social movements, and cooperative alternatives to capitalism.

Yousaf Nishat-Botero is a PhD Fellow at Bayes Business School, City University of London. His research interests are at the intersections of critical theory, organization studies, and political ecology. These interests guide his research into economic planning, degrowth/post-growth organizing, and urban/rural futures.

Discussants

Christoph Sorg, Researcher, Institute of Social Sciences, Humboldt University Berlin

Agnes Gagyi, Researcher, Department of Sociology and Work Science, University of Gothenburg

The article is available here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10245294231210980

Abstract

Through what kind of spaces might postcapitalist planning emerge? How will the process of wresting collective control over the relations of production and reproduction, and over our metabolic exchange with the rest of nature, unfold through struggle? In seeking answers to such questions, this article reviews the literature on democratic economic planning beyond capitalism and makes the case for a renewed engagement with issues of space and the urban through a closer reading of Henri Lefebvre’s work on planetary urbanization and the production of space. We argue that, to date, the economic planning literature has tended to focus on overcoming abstract labour time rather than abstract space – an oversight that prevents us from fully apprehending the urban form through which capitalism produces and reproduces its conditions of possibility and carries the seeds of its own destruction and potential supersession. Engaging with recent critical theorizing on the logistics revolution and the logistical state, we argue that postcapitalist forms of planning will arrive through an urban revolution, through struggles over urban everyday life. We suggest that future investigations into the possibilities for a democratic economic planning beyond capitalism should attend to actually existing empirical struggles over the urban – as the mediator of capitalist relations – and look for inspiration to historical and contemporary examples of municipalist praxis aiming to reinvent the commune.