City Research Online

Abstract

This is a paper-based doctoral thesis on economic planning that tries to grapple with questions about what the recovery and rehabilitation of economic planning thought and practice – as always already ecological planning – implies for organizing alternatives in and beyond the present climate conjuncture. The thesis, therefore, draws on and contributes to the new economic planning literature that is emerging across the critical social sciences and humanities, which sees elements of democratic economic planning as fundamental to postcapitalist ecological transitions and futures. The first paper in the thesis provides a critical review of this new economic planning literature, and offers a framework for reimaging and reframing economic planning from the standpoint of the more expansive web of value relations beyond the wage-commodity- nexus. The paper, therefore, makes the case for economic planning qua ecological planning as fundamental to healing the web of life, and thus argues for an oikology of planning that encompasses the co-constitutive and mutually imbricated realms of production, social reproduction, and the labour of nature as moments in the internally differentiated but unitary whole of metabolism. The second paper unpacks this further by grounding economic planning in a social metabolic ontology that also accounts for the political and libidinal economy of class, gender, race, and coloniality as the ‘modalities’ by which capitalist metabolisms are lived. The paper accordingly offers an outline of the metabolism of everyday life, drawing on the more expanded conceptions of capitalism advanced by theorists like Nancy Fraser and Jason W. Moore. In doing so, the paper also calls for greater attention to the differentiated processes of subjectivation across uneven and combined geographies of accumulation, which might animate, or inhibit, struggles and visions to organize for planetary justice. The paper then makes the case for an urban-agrarian municipalist praxis that potentially anchors economic planning in the lived experiences and struggles over the metabolism of everyday life. Finally, the third paper is a theoretically-driven and empirically-grounded study of planning with and for the cooperative and social solidarity economy. The paper focuses on the office of strategic planning for the Barcelona metropolitan region (PEMB) and its new strategic plan (Metropolitan Commitment 2030), situating its reform and renewal within the rise of new municipalist confluences in Barcelona and beyond. The paper examines how questions of social metabolism have been incorporated into planning, focusing on PEMB’s revaluation of planning from the standpoint of its food sustainability objectives. The paper thus examines and assesses the new strategic plan’s redefinition of the economic, and its layered approach to planning with and for the urban-agrarian SSE of the Barcelona metropolitan region. In sum, each of the papers in this doctoral thesis contributes to furthering understanding about the organizational landscapes out of which a democratic ecological planning for all might emerge.

Publication Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor > HD28 Management. Industrial Management
Departments:	Bayes Business School > Bayes Business School Doctoral Theses Bayes Business School > Management Doctoral Theses

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