In 1961, the little remarked musical Stop the World – I Want to Get Off hit the London stage. The story revolves around Littlechap, a circus performer, who allows the hectic mix of worldly success and amorous adventuring to blind him to his one true love, Evie. Only in his twilight years does reality dawn on poor old Littlechap.

Professor Paul James specialises in big, serious themes like globalism, social theory and contemporary politics, not musical theatre. Still, there are powerful echoes of Littlechap to his thinking. As the billboard version might have it: Stop the Global Obsession with Economic Growth – I Want Real Prosperity Instead.

Growth-obsession in China

James, director of the Global Cities Research Institute at Melbourne-based RMIT University, says we've arrived at a crux in human history. "We're at the point where we can produce more than we've ever produced… but we're finding it harder and harder to manage the relationship between needs and limits", he observes.

His proof case is China. For over three decades, the world's most populous country has been averaging GDP growth figures of around 10%. That performance has helped drag millions out of poverty, but now the hidden externalities are beginning to bite. Escalating carbon emissions, chronic air pollution and semi-occupied or unoccupied urban developments - these are just some of the negative counter-points that, in James' view, are "emptying out" the country's miracle growth story.

"The Chinese government is now thinking of shifting its growth rate of 10%… and dropping it to 5 or 6% because they are finding that it's almost impossible to sustain that high level of growth and it's causing them new problems," he says.

"This is associated in China... with a knowledge that it's necessary to reduce carbon emissions, but we have no way of doing so because growth has become key to it."

China's ambitious urbanisation programme typifies the problem of a growth-obsessed model. Infrastructure investment generates economic growth, runs the argument. At the same time, we're told the economy must grow to finance infrastructure development. "And so it all goes round in circle", says James. Hence the phenomenon of spanking new Chinese cities that lay empty because people can't afford to buy homes there.

Indeed, James sees China running a perilously similar course to that of the United States in the run-up to the financial crisis of 2008. All the conditions are there: slowing economic growth, a real-estate bubble and local councils overleveraged by infrastructure-related debt. It's a meltdown waiting to happen.

So what's needed is an alternative to growth maximisation at all costs, James argues. But how? "We need a rethinking of the way in which cities manage themselves and the way in which the global economy is managed", he argues.

Rethinking finance

Starting with the second challenge first, a lot comes down to reining in the financial markets. James identifies a catalogue of regulatory interventions that could help wean ourselves off the growth treadmill. Initiatives like the proposed Tobin tax on international financial transactions, greater oversight of over-the-counter transactions and quantitative limits on bank leverage top his list. In essence, he's calling for a recalibration of the financial system to eliminate activities designed simply to "make money for its own sake", without any other productive ends.

He admits it sounds "utopian". He also recognises that top-down regulation can only do so much. A change in corporate culture is required as well. To that end, we need an overhaul of the current accounting system, he says. Wellbeing and all-round prosperity must become the guiding objective of company directors, not simply growth of profits.

James isn't anti-growth, mind. Nor is he especially anti-market capitalism. Chinese-style communism is equally growth orientated, he points out. What he's arguing for is sustainability, plain and simple. "You might have growth. You might have diminishment of size. But it's the sustainability of the company in relation to what it delivers that is most important", he says.

He is proposing a holistic reporting framework that incorporates economics, ecology, politics and culture on an equal level. Economics should be seen "in the social domain", not as separate. Within his "one reporting method", profits would become secondary rather than primary. While he welcomes current triple bottom-line reporting approaches, such as the Global Reporting Initiative, these still remain "too analogous" to traditional financial reporting in his opinion: "When [accountants] try to translate their systems to accounting for wellbeing and vitality and resilience and prosperity, they can only think of growth and profits."

"All the incentives that made the director do what they did were based on return on investment to shareholders, which fed into their salaries", he adds, in relation to the 2008 crash. "Corporations need to change in culture rather than a simple change in regulation."

Cities

The same principles apply to his view of city planning too. Sustainability, not merely financial returns, needs to govern policy. Likewise, regulation has its limitations. Community consultation and local-decision-making must dovetail with strong, progressive central planning.

James, who is also director of the UN Global Compact Cities Programme, cites the example of Porto Alegre in Brazil. There, instead of bulldozing slums, the city government is negotiating with residents to integrate them into a municipal recycling programme. China's centralised system is heading the other way, according to James: "The issues for its city development are around the fact that it's destroying its old ways of life and traditional culture [and] what it's putting in its place is empty infrastructure that is massive and too dense."

Tomorrow's cities need to have a "local community feel", he adds. Done well, high density living can help this, rather than hinder it. Look at New York or London: two cities that have turned themselves around in recent times. But living in close quarters only really works when people are clustered around good transport nodes that give access to work, shops, cultural spaces and even urban agriculture.

"Urbanisation is positive if it's handled well. It can be done at a municipal level, but it needs national policy to help it along. [Yet] what we're seeing is pressure on governments to get a high level of return on [infrastructure] investment at a time when finding balance might be a better way of doing it", James concludes.

Stopping the world and getting off is only half the Littlechap story. The key lesson is knowing when and how to do so.

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