Critique by economization: a spatial struggle between surfers and a ‘good economy’

Recently, Asdal and colleagues introduced the ‘good economy’ concept to describe economies justified for contributing to the good beyond making profits. This article engages with the question of what happens to critique when economies are justified as good. To explore this, we examine valuation struggles surrounding what we consider an extreme case of a good economy: a port’s pier extension and wind farm projects, which were justified for contributing to sustainability and local economic development. We focus on wind and kite surfers who criticized these projects for threatening their surf spot. We analyze their critiques as relying on tools of valuation that value and order space in specific ways. We demonstrate that the surfers’ protests were driven by what we term ‘critique by economization’, which denounced the port’s projects by highlighting the surf spot’s value for local economic development. We detail how the surfers’ protests evolved through various versions of economization that we call ‘shielding’, ‘both-and’, ‘investing’, and ‘marketization’. We conclude that while good economies are making the good integral to the economic, the surfers’ activism generated the inverse movement, making the economic integral to the good of surfing. This suggests that critiques of good economies may take economized forms.