A Concrete Utopia
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the same as its concrete phases, which will be examined in chapter 3 below), and dwell at greater length on those of them that have a 'strategic' role to play. In practice - and fortunately - these stages constantly overlap and interact with one another, and that allows us to envisage a gradual process of change that may include transitions that do not figure in the theoretical schema.
The Virtuous Circle of Quiet Contraction In the 1960s, out professors of economics and technocrats crowed over the virtuous circles of growth. That period, which was described as the trente glorieuses, has now given way to what critical economists are calling the trente piteuses [the 'piteous thirty']. Even the trente glorieuses were themselves what the 'planetary gardener' Gilles Clément (Clément and Jones 2006) calls the trente disastreuses, given the amount of damage they inflicted on both nature and humanity. The virtuous circles have ultimately proved to be somewhat perverse in more than one respect. The climate change that now threatens us is a product of our past madness. The upheavals required to build an autonomous de-growth society can, in contrast, be seen as the systematic and ambitious articulation of eight interdependent changes that reinforce one another. They can all be synthesized into a 'virtuous circles' of eight 'R's: re-evaluate, reconceptualize, restructure, redistribute, relocalize, reduce, re-use and recycle. These eight interdependent goals can trigger a process of dc-growth that will be
serene, convivial and sustainable.' The list of 'R's could be extended. With every, or almost every, intervention, there will be someone who proposes what he or she sees as another essential intervention such as radicalize, reconvert, redefine, reinvent (democracy), resize, remodel, rehabilitate, reduce speed, relax, render, repurchase, reimburse, renounce, re-think, and so on - hut all these 'r's are, to a greater or lesser extent, implicit in the first eight.
