The Case for Growth: How States Finance Public Goods

Degrowth perspectives often privilege imaginaries of alternative futures – yet contemporary states tie their redistributive capacity to fiscal and demographic growth. Value capture instruments, such as property tax and development charges, assume expanding populations, rising land values, and ongoing construction. These dependencies make growth a precondition for a wide range of public goods – from infrastructure maintenance to schools. As such, I argue that without rethinking the fiscal and demographic dependencies of redistributive instruments, degrowth risks undermining the public goods many rely on. I call on planning scholars to make these dependencies visible before they produce new urban inequalities.