Post-Growth and the Ethics of “Enough”

We are trained to ask whether a project is functional, beautiful, sustainable, resilient, and financially viable.

But there is a more fundamental question:

What are we willing to consume, change, or compromise—and what are we willing to protect?

At LandmArch., we believe this is where landscape architecture becomes an ethical practice.

A landscape is never just a physical intervention.

It distributes resources, creates access, prioritises certain needs, shapes ecological processes, and leaves consequences for generations we will never meet.

That makes “enough” a powerful design principle.

Enough material.

Enough infrastructure.

Enough intervention.

Enough certainty to act—and enough humility to let landscapes evolve.

This is where post-growth becomes relevant to our profession.

It challenges a deeply embedded assumption: that progress must always mean more growth, more construction, more consumption, and more infrastructure.

For landscape architecture, this becomes a set of concrete design questions:

Do we need to build more—or can we adapt what already exists?

Do we need to replace—or can we repair?

Do we need to consume more land and resources—or can we work with what is already there?

In a time of climate instability, biodiversity loss, resource pressure, and economic uncertainty, designing for one ideal future is no longer enough.

Perhaps the most ambitious landscape is not the one that performs best in the ideal future. It is the one that remains viable across many possible futures.

For drought as well as rain.

For abundance as well as scarcity.

For growth as well as contraction.

For changing communities, budgets, and ecological conditions.

This means shifting our priorities:

From permanence to adaptability.

From extraction to stewardship.

From replacement to repair.

From optimisation to long-term usefulness.

From “more” to “enough.”

Post-growth is not simply about doing less. It is about asking what is worth doing at all—and what is worth sustaining.

Because resilience means preserving options when the future refuses to behave as expected.

Landscape architecture has the ability to make these questions visible, tangible, and spatial.

And our ideas become meaningful when they move beyond the drawing board—into planning, investment, policy, procurement, maintenance, and everyday decision-making.

And perhaps the measure of success is not how well we perform in the future we expect, but how well we remain useful in the futures we cannot predict.

That, to us, is more than sustainable design. It is post-growth landscape thinking. A post-growth mindset that does not ask us to stop creating value. It asks us to reconsider what value means.

And above all, it is a question of professional ethics.