This book addresses a central dilemma of the urban age: how to make the vast suburban
landscapes that ring the globe safe and sustainable in the face of planetary ecological crisis.
The authors argue that degrowth a planned contraction of economic overshoot is the only
feasible principle for suburban renewal. They depart from the anti-suburban sentiment of much
environmentalism to show that existing suburbia can be the centre-ground of transition to a new
social dispensation based on the principle of self-limitation. The book offers a radical new
urban imaginary that of degrowth suburbia which can arise Phoenix like from the increasingly
stressed cities of the affluent Global North and guide urbanisation in a world at risk. This
means dispensing with much contemporary green thinking including blind faith in electric
vehicles and high-density urbanism and accepting the inevitability and the benefits of planned
energy descent. A radical but necessary vision for the times.
