The spatial contract: A new politics of provision for an urbanized planet (Manchester Capitalism)

Housing. Water. Energy. Transport. Food. Education. Health care. These are the core systems which make human life possible in the 21st century. Few of us are truly self-sufficient – we rely on the systems built into our cities and towns of all shapes and sizes in order to survive, let alone thrive. Despite how important these systems are, and how much we rely on them, contemporary politics and mainstream economics in most of the world largely ignore these core systems. Politicians debate what they think will get them elected; economists value what they think drives growth. This book joins the growing chorus of activists, academics and innovators who think that we should be focusing on what matters, on the parts of our economy in which most of us work and upon which all of us depend for survival. We help push this movement along by suggesting a series of concrete steps we can take to build what we call the “Spatial Contract”. The spatial contract is a form of social contract that pays attention to a simple fact: in order for humans to be free, we rely on these basic systems that enable us to act. At the heart of the spatial contract is an agreement to channel that action into ensuring these systems are built, maintained and available to all who need them, in big cities and small towns all around the world. Housing. Water. Energy. Transport. Food. Education. Health care. These are the core systems which make human life possible in the 21st century. Few of us are truly self-sufficient - we rely on the systems built into our cities and towns of all shapes and sizes in order to survive, let alone thrive.0Despite how important these systems are, and how much we rely on them, contemporary politics and mainstream economics in most of the world largely ignore these core systems. Politicians debate what they think will get them elected; economists value what they think drives growth.0This book joins the growing chorus of activists, academics and innovators who think that we should be focusing on what matters, on the parts of our economy in which most of us work and upon which all of us depend for survival. We help push this movement along by suggesting a series of concrete steps we can take to build what we call the "Spatial Contract". The spatial contract is a form of social contract that pays attention to a simple fact: in order for humans to be free, we rely on these basic systems that enable us to act. At the heart of the spatial contract is an agreement to channel that action into ensuring these systems are built, maintained and available to all who need them, in big cities and small towns all around the world This book is an attempt to channel the energy and ideas of an incredibly diverse set of thinkers into a usable political, intellectual and analytical framework. It was born of a desire to help critical approaches to the world around us – from political economy, urban studies, geography, philosophy, ecological economics and more – to operationalize that criticality without succumbing to the temptation of ideology. It strives to be generally useful but resolutely non-universalistic.While it is written by three academics – an urban planner/ geographer, a political philosopher and an energy geographer – we worked hard to tone down the argumentation in the text. We tried to make it less academic by generally avoiding debates with existing authors. Some may find this frustrating – points of contention are either ignored, or consigned to the footnotes. We could have written an entire chapter defending our preference for ‘vertical approaches’, as opposed to horizontal approaches which focus on capitalism or neoliberalism, a decision that will no doubt anger many traditional political economists. We could have cited so many more people, written twice as many words, and engaged more deeply in debate and discussion, but we did not. This book is about how a new form of social contract, which we call the spatial contract, can help revitalize the economies of the basic things that matter – the core systems which build and provision the settlements human beings call home. -- .