DEGROWTH INSTITUTE
socially engaged urban project / 2015-ongoing /
DEGROWTH INSTITUTE
The Degrowth Institute is an initiative whose aim is to establish emancipatory narratives in cities whose population has been steadily decreasing in recent years.
Our objective is to do so by establishing bottom-up, transversal, and horizontal approaches to master-planning in these territories.
Our mission is to challenge the notion that suggests that growth - population in particular - is necessary when determining the (present, and future) success of a human settlement.
We research, work with and in, shrinking cities, and propose strategies for addressing challenges that emerge, such as how to negotiate industrial heritage, vacancy, or shifting job markets, among others. We want to bring about structural change in the way we perceive our cities.
Degrowth workshop set-up, 2017 - photo by Vika Eksta
The goal of the Degrowth Institute is to create discourse, engagement, and research around the notion of degrowth in the context of Urban Planning by:
conceptualizing and organizing frameworks of knowledge exchange;
producing artistic research- based content in a variety of formats -publications, films, objects, events and archives- about degrowth, and collective masterplanning;
and encouraging emancipatory spatial practices, in order to create new narratives for possible urban futures.
For the past year, we have been developing workshops in shrinking towns in Eastern Ukraine and the Russian Far East, that, far from seeking absolute answers and strategies, try to establish new vectors of thought: embracing degrowth does not mean being against prosperity, or demolishing the existing built environment.
Degrowth Institute workshop tools / Degrowth Manual / paper, digital print / 2017
Custom made deck of tarot cards for telling urban futures of the shrinking cities
plasticised paper, digital print / set of 40 / 2017
Contribution to the upcoming book within the framework of Trauma & Revival project / digital print 24x34 / Nero publishers / 2018
DEGROWTH INSTITUTE
The Degrowth Manual / Artist book / 2018
Terracon I / Dobropillia / digital print 31x53 / 2018
Terracon II / Dobropillia / digital print 31x53 / 2018
The Degrowth Manual is a book that we read together, write collectively and reduce progressively as the exercises as completed, usually in a workshop setting, with different actors of a particular shrinking city. It is a channel for establishing a dialogue with the locals about population degrowth, but also how can we embrace it, and develop alternative economic models.
The workshops provide a setting where we all are experts and students at the same time, and have, as a goal, not only to develop tools to start conceptualizing a future for the city that works with degrowing population numbers, but also to demystify growth and accumulation.
The book is based around the three main chapters – Cartography, Memory and Future.
Each chapter contains a narrative part and exercises –
individual, collective, sometimes writing in the pages of the book, sometimes cutting out the pages of the book.
At the end of each workshop, participants return their filled notebooks, which become part of the Degrowth Institute Library, and get a new copy in exchange, with the idea that, if they wish, they can easily reproduce the workshop/conversation with their peers.
Some of the tools proposed by the manual include a tarot-deck for urban degrowth, instructions on how to make a ‘city’ time capsule, or cartographic protocols. Through these processes we develop, collectively, a framework in which to address some of the pressing challenges that shrinking cities are facing today: ruinification, vacancy, loss of identity, alternative economies, and sense of belonging, among others.
DEGROWTH INSTITUTE
The Degrowth Institute workshop documentation / Zarya CCA / Vladivostok ed. 1 / 2018
The Degrowth Institute workshop documentation / Zarya CCA / Vladivostok ed. 1 / 2018
Custom made deck of tarot cards for telling urban futures of the shrinking cities
plasticised paper, digital print / set of 40 / 2017