Alternative futures “in the making”: Insights from three makerspaces in peripheral Greece

The great environmental and social challenges of recent decades have questioned the hegemony of growth-oriented development and its objectives. Those critiques reexamined growth-based policies and strategies, leading to ‘alternative development’ pathways, the most prominent being sustainable development. Nevertheless, critical scholars have problematized those perceptions and practices, repoliticizing the question of development, connecting it with issues of social and environmental justice and supporting ‘alternatives to development’. Building on such perspectives, primarily the degrowth literature, this paper connects alternatives to development to the question of space, analyzing the practices of three makerspaces in peripheral Greece, as potentially alternative economic and political spaces. It explores how an alternative normative framework appears in these spaces; and illuminates practices connected to commons, care, and community as seeds for the emergence of holistically alternative futures. That way the study cherishes sustainability perspectives that problematize social and environmental justice and do not propose only technical solutions, but deep political transformations and normative shifts in the ‘here and now’. • Sustainability is usually perceived as a depoliticized technical issue. • Alternative economic and political spaces could foster alternative, beyond-growth futures. • Makerspaces are potentially alternative spaces for alternative futures. • Alternative spaces could foster also alternative norms and values through their daily practices. • Alternative practices could be connected to commons, care and community perspectives.