Seminar: "Multiscalar Degrowth from the perspective of Chile's global fruit production", by Karl Krähmer

Karl Krähmer, research fellow at the University of Turin, will be giving the seminar "Multiscalar Degrowth from the perspective of Chile's global fruit production" at ICTA-UAB.

Title: "Multiscalar Degrowth from the perspective of Chile's global fruit production"

Speaker: Karl Krähmer, research fellow at the University of Turin

Date: Tuesday, January 16th 2023
Time: From 11 to 12.30h
Venue: Room Z/022 and Z/023 ICTA-UAB and online Zoom https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89493949538?pwd=Q3VyTGVTWERlaXpmZ2lYNTA2c0ZsQT09

Space and Place are made by relations, human geography has always been shaped by trade and exchange: Over the last centuries and decades though global trade has greatly accelerated, subjugating evermore rural areas as hinterlands of planetary urbanisation. Degrowth, together with other perspectives such as studies of extractivism and colonialism, have frequently critically assessed global capitalist relations and proposed the need to overcome them. Often though, this has been done recurring to an imaginary past of independent localised communities that never existed. In my PhD research I have tried to study an example of a global spatial relations in all its contradictions, analysing its functioning and its social and ecological impacts. But at the same time, I have differentiated between different versions of its existence which range from unjust and unsustainable extractivism to alternative practices which, even though of small scale, hint to possibilities of degrowth futures without negating the fundamental relationality of human geographies, reflecting both on the limitation of the quantities of the social metabolism and the quality of spatial relations.

Karl has studied Urban and Spatial Planning at the Polytechnic of Turin in Italy and achieved his Phd in Urban and Regional Development at the same university. Now he is a research fellow at the University of Turin, working on local food geographies and policies. His research over the last five years has regarded the spatialities of degrowth at multiple scales, ranging from neighbourhood initiatives to global trade relations.