The built environment contributes 39% of global greenhouse gas emissions, excluding transport. This necessarily places planning at the centre of the net-zero agenda. Yet, in many countries around the world, a persistent gap exists between policy ambition and delivery. While many planners enter the profession motivated by environmental and social justice goals, their capacity to realise low-carbon outcomes is routinely undermined by political narratives that portray planning as a brake on growth and economic development.

This presentation will explore the social, economic and environmental limitations of growth-orientated planning and illustrate how the pervasive growth mindset prevents the realisation of climate goals. With the aim of being provocative, we will introduce a series of radical alternatives – green growth, post-growth, and degrowth – and consider whether a change in direction is possible. Proposing and defining a concept we call ‘urban retrofit’, we argue for a compromise between radical growth alternatives – one that evolves into a strategic and restorative approach to planning that is multi-scalar and justice-orientated.

Looking to the future, we will sketch out why planning must recognise its vulnerabilities and seek to move decisively and collectively beyond ‘approving sprawl’ and toward the adaptive reuse of the built environment. This pathway is fraught with challenges and will require fundamental behavioural and institutional shifts – especially within planning where longstanding and often uncritical attachments to growth must be critically re-evaluated, however uncomfortable that might be.