Towards post-growth infrastructures symposium review

Last week, Federico Savini and I hosted our symposium ‘Towards post-growth infrastructures: rethinking the material and cultural conditions of prosperity’ at the University of Amsterdam and its newly renovated and award-winning Library.

Photo is of our ‘homegrown’ scholar Annemiek Prins who is presenting in the very unusual surgery room of the Amsterdam library. Check it out if you are around!

Over two days, we set out to explore these tensions, and to think of ways to move beyond this unsustainable and inequitable infrastructural status quo, sharing our thoughts in a number of sessions that moved between conceptual and empirical work, exploring:

different logics of transition: dismantling, reconstruction, repurposing, maintaining infrastructure
different arenas of infrastructural transformation, including ecological infrastructures, housing, and mobilities.

We also visited de Wooncoöperatie de Nieuwe Meent, an Amsterdam housing cooperative, and a real‑life example of post‑growth infrastructure, which has just won the Amsterdam Architecture Prize awarded by Public Jury! Thanks again to Selçuk Balamir for the wonderful tour!!

Thank you to everyone who contributed joined, presented, discussed and helped us build this emerging community around infrastructural transformation. @JB Bahers, Mario Pansera, Matthias Kranke, Olivier COUTARD, Richard Bärnthaler, Gamzenur Aygün, Oona Morrow, Michael Friesenecker, Karin Bradley, Lucía Cerrada Morato, Annemiek Prins, María José Zapata Campos, Dan Durrant, Tom Cohen, Paula HIld, Carlotta Luisa Kelber, Nils Le Bot, Dario Cottafava, De Kaskantine, Menno Houtstra, Andreea Grigorovschi, Roberto Rivas Hermann, Mireille Roddier, Daniela Perrotti, Rasa Zuzeviciute, Krystof Beaucaire, Antonio Ferreira, Daniel Petrovics, Annabelle Duval 李梦玫, Kathryn Furlong and Alessandro Rosa.

A special thanks goes out to our wonderful assistant Erva Deniz who helped make this symposium possible!

It was a real pleasure to learn from and with you and we are excited to see where these conversations go next!