Diverse alternatives: empirical evidence from German-speaking scholarship

Abstract

Current debates around the notions of the "green", "sharing" or "circular" economy tend to be dominated by advocates of conventional, profit, and growth-oriented modes of production. For example, some consider car sharing programmes, like Uber, to be a new form of sharing economy. Yet, the company's stock is traded on Wall Street, and it is held to the same standards of growth as Apple or Microsoft. Sure, car sharing schemes do have the potential, in theory, to reduce the number of cars manufactured, or the number of vehicle miles driven, but only as long as such schemes are fashionable. These schemes, and other ones, like Zip Car, are not inherently transformative. Recently, some scholars have started to critically assess the transformative potential of alternative economic practices. Critical voices, for instance, reproach the strong emphasis placed of these schemes on technological innovation (technological fixes) in the promotion of new green and clean sectors (Bina 2013; Bailey and Caprotti 2014; Gibbs and O'Neill 2015; Kenis and Lievens 2016). They argue that the green economy has been largely reinterpreted and aligned with mainstream business models and thus reinforces existing resource dependencies and societal structures rather than exploring more transformative approaches (Schulz and Bailey 2014; McLaren and Agyeman 2015; Kenis and Lievens 2016; O'Neill and Gibbs 2016). Against this backdrop, this themed issue aims at providing case study examples from the proliferating research on the so-called alternative (Zademach and Hillebrand 2013) or diverse (Gibson-Graham 2008) economies. The issue begins with this editorial introduction which provides an overview about current debates around the notions of diverse, alternative and post-growth/de-growth economies. It then outlines the more specific motivations for the issue and its regional focus, before introducing the objectives of the single papers and their conceptual interconnectedness.

Image and implementation of sustainable urban development: Showcase projects and other projects in Freiburg, Heidelberg and Tübingen, Germany

“…The planningoriented perspective focuses on application and bestpractice projects to improve structures and processes within and resulting from planning processes to foster sustainable development (Milbert 2013;Portney 2013;Roseland/Spiliotopoulou 2016). The second perspective mainly focuses on critically observing achievements, problems and narratives that go along with sustainable urban development projects (Freytag/Gössling/Mössner 2014;Mössner/Krueger 2018;Schulz/Krueger 2018).…”