The postgrowth city we need may look less like a larger metropolis—and more like the giant villages humans have been building, abandoning, rebuilding, and networking for thousands of years.
Not a proposal to recreate 3800 BCE. A proposal to stop confusing density inside a boundary with low ecological demand on the planet outside it—and to include the labor, unequal exchange, financial architecture, and security systems that make high-consumption urban life possible.
Territorial inventories mostly count emissions released inside the boundary: boilers, vehicles, local electricity use, municipal operations. This is useful for governing local sources. It is not the full ecological metabolism of the people and institutions inside the boundary.
Add purchased electricity, fuels produced elsewhere, regional airports, freight terminals, and infrastructure systems. The apparent footprint grows.
Steel, cement, glass, electronics, food, clothing, machinery, pharmaceuticals, cloud hardware, tourism, aviation, extraction, manufacturing, and the materials embodied in global trade all have places of origin. A wealthy city is not an island. It is the visible node of a planetary supply network.
NYC’s Local Law 97, for example, defines “building emissions” from operating a covered building. That is important climate policy—but it is not the same thing as a life-cycle account of the materials that made the building.
A modern high-consumption city survives by continuously importing low-entropy matter and energy and exporting wastes, emissions, financial claims, and ecological damage. Density can reduce some local demands. It does not erase the throughput.
One ledger asks: what was emitted here? The other asks: what had to happen anywhere in the world to satisfy final demand here?
What crosses the meter or tailpipe inside the accounting boundary.
Excellent for controlling local sources. Incomplete as a picture of consumption.
Follow goods and services through extraction, production, transport, construction, use, and disposal.
Harder to calculate—but much closer to the question “what does this way of life require?”
UNEP estimates that in 2017 about 11 billion tonnes of goods crossed borders directly—but producing them required more than 35 billion tonnes of material extraction. The mine waste, overburden, processing losses, water, and energy do not arrive in the shipping container. Their ecological burden remains elsewhere.
A phone, a beam, a bag of coffee, a cubic metre of concrete, an imported tomato.
Mines, tailings, logging roads, fertilizer, irrigation, soil loss, factory energy, discarded material, and worker time.
Imports can make the consumer’s territory cleaner while shifting impacts to the producer’s territory.
Environmentally extended input-output studies by Jason Hickel and colleagues quantify a persistent net physical flow from the global South to the global North. In their 2015 estimate, the net appropriation embodied in trade was:
Hickel, Dorninger, Wieland & Suwandi (2022), using environmentally extended input-output / footprint analysis. These are global North–South net flows, not Manhattan-specific values.
city footprint is not just fuel burned in the city. It is direct operations + embodied consumption + infrastructure turnover + the upstream ecological and labor systems required to reproduce that consumption.A 2024 Nature Communications study, updated with a correction in September 2026, estimates that in 2021 the global North net-appropriated 826 billion hours of embodied labor from the global South. At the study’s average Southern annual work time, that is equivalent to about 369 million full-year workers.
46 of 100 symbols are highlighted: net-appropriated Southern labor made up about 46% of the North’s total consumed labor in 2021.
The study finds net appropriation across agriculture, mining, manufacturing, services, and all skill levels—including high-skilled labor.
The authors also report Southern wages 87–95% below Northern wages for work at the same skill level. These are aggregate world-economy results, not a claim that every trade relationship is exploitative in the same way.
The terms on which wealthy economies obtain distant labor and resources are shaped by institutions as well as technology. Recent research identifies several distinct mechanisms. They should not be collapsed into one slogan—but neither should they disappear from ecological accounting.
Physical resources can flow one way while monetary value flows disproportionately the other. Hickel and colleagues estimate that the North’s 2015 net appropriation was worth $10.8 trillion at Northern prices; their broader 1990–2015 estimate totals $242 trillion in constant 2010 dollars. Those valuation choices are debated, but the physical net flows are independently measurable.
A 2026 BMJ Global Health review by Hickel, Keshavjee, Burkett and Richardson argues that IMF and World Bank structural-adjustment programs constrained policy space across much of the global South through austerity, privatization, deregulation, devaluation, and export-oriented reforms. The paper synthesizes empirical studies linking such conditions to poverty and health harms.
A 2024 World Development study finds evidence consistent with a causal mechanism in which lower-ranking currencies face higher interest rates and weaker exchange rates, narrowing policy space and increasing pressure to export embodied labor, land, energy and materials.
States also maintain coercive capacity: bases, fleets, air forces, sanctions enforcement, alliances and war-fighting systems. These have a direct ecological footprint. Their role in particular resource flows varies by case and cannot responsibly be inferred from trade data alone.
The exact military footprint is unusually uncertain because reporting is incomplete. But the credible estimates are large enough that omitting it is not neutral.
Scientists for Global Responsibility and the Conflict and Environment Observatory estimate about 2.75 GtCO₂e per year, including military operations and supply chains, with a modeled range of roughly 3.3–7.0% of global GHG emissions. Their estimate does not include the additional emissions caused by wars themselves.
Brown University’s Costs of War project estimated that the U.S. military emitted 1.2 billion metric tonnes of GHGs from 2001–2017, more than 400 million tonnes from war-related fuel use. Brown describes the Department of Defense as the world’s largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels.
A 2025 PLOS Climate study reports official DOD Scope 1+2 emissions of more than 636 MtCO₂e during 2010–2019, while noting that this excludes at least Scope 3 supply-chain emissions. Its time-series model found that a 1% long-run decrease in military spending was associated with about a 0.98% decrease in DOD energy consumption.
World military expenditure in 2025, according to SIPRI—the highest level in its series.
Combined 2025 military spending of the seven G7 countries, calculated from SIPRI country data: about 47.6% of the world total.
NATO members’ share of global military expenditure in 2025. The U.S. alone accounted for about 33%.
A 2026 Nature Communications integrated-assessment study coauthored by Jason Hickel compares high- and low-consumption futures while varying climate policy and global inequality. Across carbon-price pathways, lower-consumption futures reduce modeled warming by about 0.3–1.1°C relative to high-consumption futures.
These are scenario-model results, not forecasts or required consumption ceilings. The authors explicitly call the numerical convergence thresholds modeling heuristics.
A 2026 Nature Climate Change perspective synthesizes five principles for serious post-growth modeling: well-being, sufficiency, reduced inequality, repurposing production, and North–South convergence.
Post-growth research distinguishes reducing unnecessary production in affluent economies from expanding the material and energy services needed for decent lives where they remain insufficient.
Every increment of affluent throughput is additional steel, cement, energy, land, freight, machinery, maintenance and waste that the decarbonization system must somehow outrun.
The more interesting comparison is not Manhattan versus a 1.6-million-person Neolithic settlement. It is Manhattan’s high-throughput metabolism versus a network of many bounded settlements whose food, water, materials, repair, governance, and waste cycles are kept as local and regenerative as possible.
Hover or tap a village. The diagram is schematic: the claim is polycentricity, not autarky.
Cucuteni–Trypillia “mega-sites” such as Maidanetske and Talianki show that thousands of people could aggregate in planned settlements long before modern states, fossil logistics, steel towers, sewer grids, cars, or industrial food systems. Recent archaeological work also finds periods of unusually low household inequality at Trypillia mega-sites.
Population estimates, permanence, farming systems, political organization, and the meaning of the sites remain active research questions.
“City” does not have to mean a permanently expanding machine for concentrating capital, infrastructure, and imported throughput.
Keep modern medicine, science, communications, sanitation, rights, accessibility, and selected shared infrastructure. Remove the assumption that material throughput must grow forever.
Yield per worker, yield per hectare, calories, biodiversity, soil carbon, nutrient leakage, fossil inputs, labor quality, resilience, and nutritional diversity are different metrics. Small and diversified farms can perform surprisingly well on several that industrial comparisons often omit.
A 2021 meta-analysis summarized by FAO found smaller farms, on average, had higher yields and greater crop and non-crop biodiversity; evidence on greenhouse-gas intensity and resource-use efficiency was less conclusive.
FAO defines it as ecological design of interactions among plants, animals, people, and environments, explicitly including social fairness and resilience.
Regenerative systems still need land, labor, nutrients, water, knowledge, and careful limits. The point is to optimize for living systems and sufficiency—not maximum commodity throughput.
IPCC AR6 concludes that demand-side measures and new ways of providing services could reduce emissions in end-use sectors by 40–70% by 2050 relative to baseline scenarios, while remaining consistent with improving basic well-being. It discusses infrastructure, compact planning, reduced floor-space demand, mobility shifts, diets, circular material use, and socio-cultural change.
| Question | High-consumption metro system | Polycentric postgrowth settlement network |
|---|---|---|
| Food | Globalized, specialized, freight-dependent; nutrients often leave producing regions. | Regional first; diversified local production where ecologically suitable; trade for genuine scarcity. |
| Buildings | Large mineral stocks; steel, cement, glass, mechanical systems; continual redevelopment. | Reuse first; lower material intensity; bio-based/local materials where suitable; repairable construction. |
| Mobility | Large transport infrastructure even where per-capita urban car use is low; extensive freight and aviation. | Daily needs within walking/cycling distance; shared rail for inter-settlement mobility; far less routine freight. |
| Waste | Large centralized streams; nutrient and material cycles spatially separated. | Short loops: compost, repair, reuse, greywater, nutrient return, local accountability. |
| Energy | High service demand; huge embodied energy in infrastructure and consumption. | Sufficiency first; renewables sized to a lower material and service demand. |
| Governance | Decisions often far from ecological consequences and supply-chain workers. | More decisions made near affected land, water, labor, and common resources—with federation for larger scales. |
| Success metric | Growth in output, property values, throughput, tax base. | Meeting needs within ecological ceilings; time, health, security, habitat, durable sufficiency. |
This is deliberately an index, not a fake tonnage estimate. Move the structural assumptions. The model asks how much planetary throughput remains when ordinary life needs less imported material and energy—and when a settlement is less dependent on systematically cheap distant inputs.
A high-throughput, import-dependent settlement. Local efficiency can still coexist with a large global metabolism.
Index = simple weighted average of six structural pressures. It is a teaching device, not a life-cycle assessment. The point is to make assumptions visible and editable.
A postgrowth settlement asks a different first question: what arrangement of land, tools, knowledge, care, and cooperation lets everyone live well with the least permanent claim on the rest of the biosphere?
It is a remarkably transit-rich and, in many respects, spatially efficient city. Those are genuine achievements. But the ecological question is larger: what total material-and-energy system is required to reproduce the lives, buildings, institutions, incomes, and consumption located there?
Once that is the question, the relevant alternative is no longer “dense city or sprawling suburb.” Both are versions of a high-income, high-throughput provisioning system. The more interesting comparison is with a society organized around sufficiency, local provisioning, regenerative landscapes, durable shared material stocks, and many human-scale centers linked by federation rather than endless agglomeration.
IPCC, AR6 WGIII, Summary for Policymakers / Chapter 5. Demand-side mitigation can reduce end-use emissions 40–70% by 2050 relative to baseline scenarios while remaining consistent with improved basic well-being. ipcc.ch
UNEP International Resource Panel, Global Resources Outlook 2024. High-income countries use roughly six times more resources and generate roughly ten times the climate impacts of low-income countries; extraction and processing drive a majority of climate impacts. unep.org
UNEP IRP, Sustainable Trade in Resources (2020). In 2017, producing 11 billion tonnes of directly traded goods required more than 35 billion tonnes of material extraction. unep.org
Hickel, Dorninger, Wieland & Suwandi, Global Environmental Change (2022). Estimates North–South net appropriation in 2015 at 12 bn tonnes materials, 822m hectares, 21 EJ energy and 188m person-years of labor. sciencedirect.com
Hickel, Hanbury Lemos & Barbour, Nature Communications (2024; corrected 2026). Estimates 826bn hours of net South→North labor appropriation in 2021; 46% of labor consumed in the North was net-appropriated from the South. nature.com
Hickel, Keshavjee, Burkett & Richardson, BMJ Global Health (2026). Review of structural adjustment, policy conditionality, social outcomes, and proposals for non-recurrence. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Fritz, World Development (2024), “How much a dollar cost”. Empirical study of currency hierarchy as a driver of ecologically unequal exchange through interest-rate and exchange-rate mechanisms. sciencedirect.com
Hickel & Sullivan, New Political Economy (2026). Finds the absolute core–periphery income gap increased 170–270% from 1960–2023 depending on currency concept; argues that catch-up narratives are not supported by their data. tandfonline.com
Li, Kikstra, Keyßer, Hickel, Riahi et al., Nature Communications (2026). Integrated-assessment modeling finds lower-consumption futures associated with 0.3–1.1°C less warming than high-consumption futures across carbon-price pathways. nature.com
Slameršak, Fisch-Romito, Hickel et al., Nature Climate Change (2026). Five principles for post-growth climate scenarios: well-being, sufficiency, reduced inequalities, economic repurposing and North–South convergence. nature.com
Kallis, Hickel, O’Neill, Jackson, Victor, Raworth, Schor, Steinberger & Ürge-Vorsatz, Lancet Planetary Health (2025). Review of post-growth research and provisioning systems for high well-being within planetary boundaries. sciencedirect.com
SIPRI, Trends in World Military Expenditure 2025 (published 2026). World total $2.887tn; U.S. $954bn; G7 country values used here sum to $1.373tn; NATO members accounted for 55% of the global total. sipri.org
Parkinson & Cottrell, Scientists for Global Responsibility / CEOBS (2022). Estimates the global military carbon footprint at 3.3–7.0% of global GHG emissions, with a best estimate of 5.5% (~2.75 GtCO₂e). ceobs.org
Crawford, Brown University Costs of War (2019). Estimates 1.2bn tonnes GHG from the U.S. military, 2001–2017; describes DOD as the world’s largest institutional fossil-fuel consumer. brown.edu
Thombs, Jorgenson & Clark, PLOS Climate (2025). Time-series analysis links sustained reductions in U.S. military expenditure to substantial reductions in DOD energy use. plos.org
Ecological Economics (2025), ecological unequal exchange and China. Finds a multi-tiered hierarchy in which China is both a resource provider to core economies and an appropriator from more peripheral regions, including internally. doi.org
UNEP, Circular Economy in Cities. Circularity means narrowing, slowing, and closing resource loops and avoiding linear infrastructure lock-in. unep.org
NYC Department of Buildings, Local Law 97. NYC building policy focuses on operating emissions of covered buildings; this is important territorial climate policy but not a life-cycle material account. nyc.gov
FAO summary of Ricciardi et al., Nature Sustainability (2021). Meta-analysis found smaller farms, on average, had higher yields and more biodiversity; several other efficiency and emissions comparisons remain uncertain. fao.org
FAO, Agroecology. Ecological design of crops, livestock, farms, landscapes, and social relations for resilient and fair food systems. fao.org
Hofmann, Müller-Scheeßel & Müller, Antiquity (2024). House-size Gini coefficients across Trypillia sites indicate temporarily reduced household inequality at mega-sites. cambridge.org