City Research Online

Abstract

Democratic economic planning is emerging once again after decades of marginalization. This article contributes to the ecological turn in the new economic planning literature by attending to new municipalist approaches to repairing metabolic rifts opened by capitalist urbanization. It presents a qualitative study of the office of strategic planning for the Barcelona metropolitan region (PEMB) to examine how questions of social metabolism have informed its revaluation of planning, situating these changes within what we identify as an emergent ‘metabolic municipalism’. By examining how PEMB has redefined ‘the economic’ in economic planning, and how it has worked around the challenges of distributed planning without power, through public-community partnerships, we aim to illuminate and critically assess the elements of an ecological planning for metabolic sovereignty in conditions of planetary urbanization.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Copyright © 2025, the authors. Reuse is restricted to non-commercial and no derivative uses.
Publisher Keywords:	economic planning, urban political ecology, social metabolism, new municipalism, food sovereignty, foundational economy
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HC Economic History and Conditions H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor H Social Sciences > HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform J Political Science > JS Local government Municipal government
Departments:	Bayes Business School Bayes Business School > Management

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