Degrowth is a radical and emancipatory approach to socio-ecological transformation aimed at achieving a good life for all. In light of the ongoing poly-crisis, degrowth provides a vital framework for reimagining and transforming our societal metabolism, structures, and relationships, striving for a sustainable and equitable future. However, despite strong calls for restructuring our spatial practices and relational dynamics, some scholars argue that degrowth lacks a clear spatial dimension.

To address this gap, we aim to bring together conference attendees from diverse geographical backgrounds to collaboratively “map” a degrowth future as a positive narrative for change in Europe. This initiative emphasizes the need not only to accompany and analyse change but also to actively co-envision and co-create it. To facilitate this process, we must imagine change and narrate desirable futures. In this endeavour, we will employ speculative cartography and collective mapping as forms of imaginative and intentional storytelling for transformation. By integrating collective and individual steps of reading, visualizing and reflecting, we aim to co-create visions of good futures that empower and motivate actors in the transformation process, strengthening their capacity for meaningful change.

The workshop facilitators are degrowth scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds, including Spatial Planning, Feminist Ecological Economics, and Transformation Research, and well experienced in conducting speculative workshops with conference audiences. As they read aloud excerpts from utopian speculative fiction, degrowth imaginaries and cartographic essays, participants will be invited to visualise their own associations, questions, and reflections about desirable (European) futures on a long sheet of paper (the “map”). This will be followed by a collective sharing session and a silent discussion, allowing comments and questions directly on the map. Participants will draw thematic, ecological, social, and spatial connections between various “places”, emphasising human and more-than-human interdependencies, routes of provisioning and care, sources and flows of transformation knowledge, etc. In small group discussions, participants will then explore specific “regional clusters”, aspects or questions of particular interest, which will again be visualised on the map and collectively reflected upon.