Systemic Shifts
Complex systems, such as ecosystems or economic and social orders, often resist smooth change. They may tip suddenly and get locked into a new stable state [1]. Catastrophe theory frames development not as a gradual curve but as a landscape of competing equilibria. Assuming that the prevailing growth paradigm represents one basin of attraction, then a wellbeing-oriented, post-growth trajectory may represent another. Parameters that sustain the status quo, including continued institutional support and entrenched consumption patterns, can be countered by forces that shift the balance and nudge the system toward a new equilibrium. But incremental adjustments – such as efficiency gains or ‘decoupling’ growth from resource use – may prove insufficient [2].
Urbanisation intensifies these dynamics. Cities have been portrayed as extractive ‘parasites’ – consuming resources from afar, producing waste that others must absorb [3]. Yet cities are also crucibles of innovation and change, and concentrate opportunities for resource recovery [4], [5]. Two centuries ago, Johann Heinrich von Thünen mapped land use in concentric rings around a market town. He captured a world where transport costs dictated farming intensity: perishable goods clustered near the city, while grazing stretched to the margins [6], [7]. By the mid-20th century, industrial sprawl had distorted the pattern: land values became shaped less by spoilage and cartage than by anticipated urban expansion driving investment outward and creating zones of intensifying agriculture at the metropolitan edge [8].
Today, as societies confront ecological limits, the original logic of proximity re-emerges in unexpected form. Localised food production, shorter supply chains, and ‘prosumer’ models suggest not a return to the 19th century, but the re-embedding of agriculture within urban life and a reinvention of spatial economics for post-growth wellbeing. Under such a paradigm, priorities are reoriented from material expansion to sustaining prosperity through interaction of natural capital and its ecosystem services with built, human, and social forms of capital [9], [10]. Sustainable practices in urban farming can link environmental processes with human needs, transforming cities from mere consumers of hinterlands to fertile ecosystems.
While resource use and GDP are tightly coupled, the relationship between resource footprints and quality of life is logarithmic: beyond a point, more consumption yields little additional wellbeing [2]. This piece argues that urban agriculture serves as a symbol for a different economic logic and a signal of broader possibility grounded in sufficiency rather than accumulation, participation rather than passivity, regeneration rather than extraction, and exemplifies how societies can cross into a post-growth wellbeing regime. But it is also a mechanism that changes real flows of energy and matter, altering land use dynamics and reshaping social relations. Instead of alienated individuals, it fosters ‘prosumers’ – citizens who are both producers and consumers, co-creators of sustenance and meaning.
The Machine and the Organism
Economics lives between two metaphors. One is the machine: neat, rational, deductive, a dream of order. The other is the organism: messy, adaptive, evolutionary, a story of survival and change. Both have shaped the discipline, but both are incomplete and mislead when taken alone. Economies evolve. Schumpeter described ‘creative destruction’ as their pulse, and firms can be mapped as populations subject to variation and selection. However, if everything is evolution, nothing can be steered. A society relying only on rational decision-making risks sterility, one trusting only in blind evolution risks chaos.
Crashes are not anomalies but the texture of economic life. Take AI, the newest chapter in the long story of disruption. The question is not whether it will transform society (it already has) but whether we will steer its trajectory or drift with it. It is easy to perceive AI as a threat that erodes trust, deepens inequality, replaces humans. In this sense, AI is a Darwinian experiment. Left unchecked, algorithms may disembed from society, triggering a counter-movement, with people pushing back, à la Polanyi. Already we see the cycle: disruption, dislocation, then new norms and regulations.
This oscillation – order, chaos, order – is the system. Economics promises clarity, yet often it mistakes the map for the territory. Models that promise certainty but ignore complexity lead us astray. Progress is neither the gift of perfect models nor the accident of chance, but the outcome of adaptive systems and learning through trial and error.
Prosperity
Growth, as conventionally defined – rising output, faster flows – seems plausible on the surface. But it is a treadmill that undermines the ground beneath it, and it has become disconnected from flourishing. Paradigms may shift when old ones fail, and each crisis opens space for new ideas. Tools like AI influence outcomes, as do choices. The future will in part be written by the values we inscribe in algorithms and the institutions we sculpt to govern them. Equally urgent is the question of prosperity. For long, economic growth has been the lodestar of public imagination. Has it guaranteed rising wellbeing? Secured ecological stability? Ensured resilience in the face of crises? Or has it left behind exhausted soils, excessive consumption, and fragile supply chains?
Societies advance by imitating what worked before – replicating existing ‘best practice’, or they innovate toward new frontiers cf. [11]. If imitation dominates, progress is incremental and tethered to the past. But if innovation prevails, societies can escape inertia and avoid the risk of being trapped in a cycle of diminishing return, instead pivoting toward sustainable prosperity. What if the future of prosperity lies not in clinging to unsustainable trajectories, scaling ever upward, but in adopting new practices that challenge orthodoxy, in rooting ourselves more deeply, in nurturing wellbeing within the limits of our planet?
Resource use and growth move in lockstep, whereas gains in wellbeing fade beyond a certain point. The formula breeds fragility. Continued efficiency tinkering may keep us locked into the growth paradigm. To break with it, a systemic pivot appears imperative. Navigating the next chapter of prosperity spells uncertainty. Complex systems tend to lurch, tip, snap.
Sustainability Transition
Mainstream sustainability discourse often falls into a linear rhetoric: reduce emissions by X percent, increase efficiency by Y percent, achieve ‘net zero’ by some future date. These targets trivialise sustainability by framing it as a technical problem of optimisation, rather than a cultural problem of meaning. They risk narrowing our vision. Urban agriculture shatters the linearity. It is about reweaving relationships – between people and land, between consumption and production, between cities and ecosystems. It is about cultivating a sense of sufficiency and ‘enoughness’ in a culture addicted to more.
Traditional workhorses of economic accounting miss the essence of prosperity. Gadgets sold and concrete poured to build taller skylines tell us little about whether lives are meaningful. Similarly, counting how many people are in employment obscures more than it reveals. A useful compass would track job quality, work-life balance, or social cohesion, speaking not only to the costs of labour market exclusion but the benefits of alternatives: reduced hours, job-sharing, roles that serve communities.
Scholars have proposed alternative metrics that integrate economic, ecological, and social dimensions [9], [12], [13], [14]. In this systems view, wellbeing rises only when all forms of capital – engineered and human, environmental, and cultural – advance together. Any one of them can constitute the limiting constraint. For example, abundant infrastructure cannot compensate for degraded ecosystems or fraying social bonds. This embodies a profound shift: growth is no longer the ultimate aim; instead, prosperity is defined by balance, sufficiency, and resilience.
Still, exploring a potential sustainability transition demands a bolder approach. Charting competing system pathways and their discontinuities, bifurcation theory can depict the role of urban agriculture in a trajectory switch. Set and category theory enable integration of spatial analysis and uncertainty-aware learning about the interplay among economic, ecological, and social domains. Amid system unpredictability defying rigid equations, machine learning-assisted investigation without presuming a rigid functional form offers a flexible way to reveal webs of interrelations between urban farming, including its ecosystem service features, and wellbeing. Relevant mapping ensures that corresponding empirical insights feed back into theory. The result is not just a technical synthesis but a conceptual one: a framework that treats urban agriculture as both a practical intervention and a lens through which to picture the transition from growth-driven economics to wellbeing-centred sustainability.
Analytical tools matter, but no technical model can substitute for public will. The growth imperative is not just an economic habit; it is deeply entrenched in institutions and imaginations. To challenge it requires more than data. It requires narrative. Urban agriculture provides one. It is vivid, tangible, and relatable. It invites us to consider prosperity not as something extracted from distant mines or factories, but as something cultivated in our neighbourhoods. A tomato grown on a rooftop may not shift GDP by much, but it can alter conceptions, as a precursor to transformation.
Regenerative Cities
Urbanisation has long shaped humanity’s relationship with land, once clustering around rivers and trade routes [15], [16], now expanding with an ecological footprint that displaces farmland and accelerates deforestation [17], [18], [19]. Cities represent modernity, yet undermine the very foundations they depend on. Urban agriculture offers a counter-narrative – producing food locally, fostering community engagement, recycling waste [4], [20], [21]. Consider water, both a pillar of agriculture and one of its sharpest constraints [19], [22], [23], [24]. Unlike the ‘take, make, dispose’ model rooted in abundance, circularity reframes scarcity as a catalyst for creativity, turning wastewater into a resource that can sustain urban farming, especially when integrated with thoughtful infrastructure to protect public health and reduce environmental discharge [4], [25], [26], [27], [28].
Cities offer a stage for rethinking prosperity as balance among economic, natural, and social capital. Modest steps as they seem, rooftop gardens and community plots are not a nostalgic return to some fabled past, but a bold step into a different future where prosperity is not extracted but grown. The question is not whether we can afford to embrace such practices, but whether we can afford not to. The work ahead is the work of telling new stories about what prosperity means and cultivating practices that embody those stories. Urban agriculture is a story about reclaiming belonging and purpose – experimental, adaptive, honest; perhaps modest in scale, but profound in implication. Moving beyond rhetoric and understanding its potential impact requires well-designed research to address relevant system dynamics and lived realities. A post-growth city would not reject technology or trade, but redirect ambition from depletion and acceleration to regeneration and depth. The point is not that urban farming alone will ‘solve’ the crisis of growth. It is not a panacea, but a seed of transformation exemplifying ecological integrity, social cohesion and system resilience. It reminds us of a future shaped not just in tech towers but cultivated in the soil beneath our feet – where ‘grey’ and ‘green’ infrastructures engage in dialogue rather than conflict, and participation holds promise for shared, inclusive wellbeing.
References
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