Narrating postgrowth through infrastructures of curatorship

Abstract

This paper reflects on the possibilities to tackle more effectively an entire host of sustainability concerns and related upscaling questions, albeit on a different note than articulated by incumbent urban agendas. It does so from a speculative and, not least, critical standpoint, whereby a postgrowth orientation in planning is chiefly informed by infrastructures of curatorship. Such infrastructures are further problematized in view of several evocative cases from the Netherlands, to elucidate how the circulation and concoction of heterogeneous ideas and materials provides important clues toward alternative value regimes. The latter can unsettle entrenched ways of dwelling, learning and narrating the city and, as such, to benefit ongoing attempts to re-imagine urban and spatial planning from a postgrowth perspective.