Worldwide Experts on Degrowth and Environmental Justice Gather at the UAB

Until Friday, the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) is a global hub of degrowth and environmental justice theories. For the fourth year running, some forty internationally renowned researchers, academics and activists from sixteen different countries will gather at the Summer School of Degrowth and Environmental, which this year will address the problem of green and tourism gentrification in the cities.

The school is organized by ICTA-UAB in collaboration with Research & Degrowth and will take place from June 25 to July 7 2017, at the ICTA-UAB building located on the UAB Bellaterra Campus, and in Barcelona (Spain) and Cerbère (France). Sustaining a life of diversity, fairness and justice requires transformations, or series of continuous transformations, which can be slow and fast, big and small, throughout the entire spectrum of society.

The Summer School on Degrowth and Environmental Justice will reflect on transformations needed to achieve a sustainable, fair and just life. Attendants will talk about the type of transformations that result in absolute reductions of material and energy throughput and in environmental crimes and social injustice, but which also provoke and facilitate transformations in the attitudes leading towards embracing differences and enhancing conviviality.

All along the course, participants look at the roots of degrowth and environmental justice, while exploring alternatives and transformational paths: starting with alternatives to extractivism and extractivist politics; moving on to alternatives to growth-based modes of organizing production and consumption emerging in communities of the South and the North; which will consequently involve exploring the role of communities and the relations of care. It brings together leading scholars in the field of degrowth and environmental justice such as Joan Martínez Alier, Professor of Economics and Economic History at the UAB and ICTA-UAB researcher, and the ICREA researchers at ICTA-UAB Giorgos Kallis and Isabelle Anguelovski.

The course also takes a glimpse across the wider societal level, and in particular at the alternative and emerging approaches to governing a city. To this aim lessons are drawn from the experiences of the civil platform currently governing Barcelona (Barcelona en Comú).

A public event entitled "Struggles Toward a Fairer Barcelona" was held in order to address issues such as environmental justice, touristic degrowth and green gentrification. It took place on Friday June 30 at 7 p.m. at the Casal del Barri Pou de la Figuera (Sant Pere Més Baix 70). The event was organized in collaboration with the Barcelona City Council.