Growth Infrastructures: Workshop

How has economic growth become so entangled in human activities? This workshop explores how the quest for continuous growth and alternative attempts to instigate “post-growth” or “degrowth” are each embedded in overlapping socio-material relations that facilitate core societal functions, including sustainable development.

Participants in this workshop will collectively develop and apply the concept of ‘growth infrastructures’ to understand how economic and social relations oriented towards growth might be converted into post-growth infrastructures, as well as how attempts to instigate post-growth infrastructures can inadvertently re-embed growth.

This workshop (1) situates (post-)growth amongst the various ‘infrastructural turns’ mushrooming across the social sciences and humanities in recent decades; (2) empirically investigates infrastructural relations of (post-)growth across time and space; and (3) illuminates the possibilities and limits of transformations required to tackle today’s rapidly unfolding and intersecting socio-ecological crises. The research papers presented and discussed in this workshop are working drafts that will subsequently be revised in preparation of a special issue of the journal Economy & Society who along with the Rudolf Agricola School for Sustainable Development are co-sponsoring this event.

Workshop Agenda:

Programme 23 May 2024

Location: " Lichtkoepel ", Norman Building, Oude Kijk in 't Jatstraat 42

09:00 Tea/ Coffee

09:30  Welcome, introductions and overview Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn and Matthias Kranke

10:00–11:00 Session 1: Preeti Sampat – Infrastructures as growth experiments: Revisiting India’s Special Economic Zones

11:00 Coffee break

11.30–12.30 Session 2: Anne Beaulieu – Materiality and the stuff of infrastructured life

Location: "'t Atelier", Norman Building, Lutkenieuwstraat 5

12:30 Lunch break

14:00-15:00 Session 3: Kathryn Furlong – Putting devaluation on the map: Infrastructure and the urban growth machine, from debt to financialization

15:00–16:00 Session 4: Eric Cezne and Kei Otsuki – Amazon’s road to growth? Infrastructure development, destruction, and sustainability in the world’s largest rainforest

16:00 Coffee break

16:30–17:30 Session 5: Sylvain Maechler and Valérie Boisvert – Fixing the ecological crisis: The promises and pitfalls of green accounting infrastructures

18:00 Drinks and dinner at NOK, Forum Groningen, Nieuwe Markt 1

Programme 24 May 2024

Location: de Weverij, Norman Building, Lutkenieuwstraat 5

09:00 Tea/ Coffee

09:30–10:30 Session 6: Daniel Durrant – From megaprojects to post-growth infrastructures

10:00–11:00 Session 7: Aslı Yürük and Ozan Karaman – Stretching urban fabric through privatization of public infrastructure: The case of Galataport Waterfront redevelopment project

11:00 Coffee break

11.30–12.30 Session 8: Senka Neuman-Stanivukovic – Rhythms of growth infrastructure:Complicating geotechnopolitics in the Balkans

12:30 Lunch break

13:00–14:00   Session 9: Clemens Hoffmann – Decarbonization rush? The problem of speed in transforming the world

14:00–14:30 Wrap-up and Paths Forward: Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn and Matthias Kranke