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The Everyday Economies cluster explores alternative conceptualisations of the economy and space/place.

Overview

As a collective, we are broadly interested in a diversity of ways of thinking about the economy and place, beyond the mainstream discourses of economic growth and development that tend to foreground top-down policy interventions that promote competition for mobile resources between places with already scarce resources, and/or a focus on competitive ‘sectors’. Instead, we explore alternative conceptualisations of the economy and space/place, which include:

• An understanding of ‘value’ as multidimensional and beyond the economic/monetary - including social, cultural, spatial, symbolic, psychological, educational.
• An approach to the study of value and values as relational and spatialised circuits of value through which economies are socially constructed
• A recognition of economic diversity and complexity, including the often overlooked parts of the economy that include the Everyday Economy, the Foundational Economy, Diverse Economies and their intersections with place-based sustainable development
• A focus on local economies as lived and experienced in place, with an emphasis on livelihoods, place attachment and identity, stemming from a rootedness in history and connection to temporality of place.
• An exploration of processes of supporting local economies that work from below, including commoning, Community wealth building, and the Social and Solidarity Economy
• A recognition of the inequalities between participants in the economy, particularly in places undergoing transformation, and how they might shape the practice of co-production.
• An engagement with degrowth and post-growth discourses, with a focus on meeting human needs within planetary boundaries and moving away from using GDP as a measure of economic progress
• A commitment to the green and just transitions and an interest in the circular economy, including how space and place can support these.

Underpinning these explorations of alternative ways of thinking about the economy and its embeddedness in place, there is a need to understand the relationship between local and global processes, how such economic changes and structural forces impact places over time, and how urban planning and policy responds to and steers such processes.

People

Dr Jessica Ferm, The Bartlett School of Planning
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Ben Hughes, The Bartlett School of Planning
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Outputs

Publications

• Tomaney, J., Blackman, M., Natarajan, L., Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, F., Panayotopoulos-Tsiros, D. and Taylor, M. (2023) Social Infrastructure and Left Behind Places. Routledge.
• Rydin, Y. (2023) Discovering the diverse economy of a ‘left-behind’ town, Planning Practice & Research, 38:4, 504-519
• Ferm, J. (2023). Hyper-Competitive Industrial Markets: Implications for Urban Planning and the Manufacturing Renaissance. Urban Planning, 8(4), 263-274.
• Ferm, J., Sendra, P., Martins, J., Manzini Ceinar, I., & Ilie, E. (2022) Understanding the Value of Artists Studios. Acme.
• Taylor, M. (2024) The Economic Politics of Anti-Displacement Struggle: Connecting Diverse and Community Economies Research with Critical Urban Studies on the Carpenters Estate, London. Antipode, 56(2), 672-693
• Thompson, M. and Lorne, C. (2023) Designing a New Civic Economy: On the Emergence and Contradictions of Participatory Experimental Urbanism, Antipode, 55(6), 1919–1942.

Ongoing research strands and cluster activities

• Everyday Economies and Social Infrastructure
• Low-cost workspace struggles and conflicts - Special Open Sessions at ISA-RC21 Melbourne, RGS London (2023) and RSA Florence (2024)
• Planning in low/no growth contexts and work on Diverse Economies in left behind places
• Economic development from below
• Municipalism, community wealth building and common ownership
• Local, community initiatives to address spatial disparities

Related links

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Photo by Dr Jessica Ferm