Loved keystone places: spatialising fundamental human needs for post-growth strategies in rural areas

People’s connections to their surroundings play a vital role in enhancing their quality of life, yet these relational aspects have remained underexplored in post-growth studies. A critical challenge lies in identifying and integrating these place-based aspects into local post-growth strategies to decouple a good quality of life from access to and dependence on commodities and income. We propose a framework centred on the concept of loved keystone places, to gather and structure the relations that people maintain with and across their surroundings. Loved keystone places are locations, often non-commodified, that provide high a good quality of life. Employing the Human Scale Development Matrix (HSDM) of Manfred Max-Neef, we move beyond the prevailing cultural ecosystem services approach to understand how people’s surroundings contribute to a good quality of life. Through a mixed mobile methodology that includes 37 walking interviews, 65 children drawings and eight oral histories we use HSDM to identify links between loved keystone places and a good quality of life, underlining the centrality of social relations and highlighting that such places are mostly non-commodified. Our approach can contribute to rural post-growth by integrating within spatial planning the protection and socialisation of uncommodified places that can provide high a good quality of life with few resource requirements.