Degrowth Institute / Institute Degrowth

Institutional Version

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The Degrowth Institute is an initiative that was started in 2015 by METASITU, with the aim to establish emancipatory narratives in (post)industrial cities whose populations have been steadily decreasing in recent years, particularly in the Donbas region. Its mission is to challenge the notion that suggests that growth —population in particular— is necessary when determining the success of a human settlement. Yet masterplanners, urbanists, and developers continue to strategize to reverse the dynamics of shrinkage, caught up in a capitalist rhetoric of growth and accelerationism.

In order to challenge this framework, and set the future into a different vector, the Degrowth Institute establishes bottom-up, transversal, and horizontal approaches to master-planning in these territories. They base their work on researching, working with and in, shrinking cities. Avoiding to suggest specific strategies, they rather create a collective momentum to address challenges such as how to work with industrial heritage, housing vacancy, or the shifting job markets, among others.

The Degrowth Institute wants to bring about structural change in the way people perceive their cities. They want to create discourse, engagement, and research around the notion of degrowth in the context of Urban Planning by a) conceptualizing and organizing frameworks of knowledge exchange, b) producing artistic research-based content in a variety of formats —publications, films, objects, events, and archives— about degrowth, and collective masterplanning; and c) encouraging emancipatory spatial practices, in order to create new narratives for possible urban futures.

The Degrowth Institute aspires to result in a transformative experience for individual participants in the project, as well as trigger new forms of working together at a local level and, eventually, collective proposals for new guidelines, approaches to resisting and challenging existing growth policies, and actions against particular (imposed) strategies regarding the assessment and management of heritage. And, ultimately, in understanding the surrounding landscapes more intimately, by reconstituting our personal relationships to the territories we inhabit(ed).

future@metasitu.com

Institutional SubVersion

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At METASITU we usurp different identities in order to pursue our interests. Artists.

Curators. Project coordinators. By ‘legalizing’ and validating our activities as an official organization, ‘The Degrowth Institute’, we rendered ourselves visible —or rather, potentially visible— to sponsors and funding bodies who might support our endeavor of researching alternatives to growth-oriented master planning in postindustrial shrinking cities. Institutionalizing our activities also meant added credibility in front of partner organizations, and colleagues working in the field of urbanism. Using chameleon-like strategies of becoming, and constantly changing to suit the environment, we embody the institute, the artist, the curator, the designer, and the publisher among many other roles.

As humans we exist in an amalgam of institutionalized regimes throughout our lives.

The idea of being registered, being legal, the hierarchies, and the somewhat slightly outdated bureaucratic but default approach to whatever issue we are dealing with, is a proof that we seek institutionalization. Being recorded. Existing within a larger system. Even in our rebellion, we seek for validation by reproducing the same outdated formats that people used in the past. Economic validation as the monthly salary, and pension schemes; social approval in the form of fame and acclaim, or institutional recognition are not necessarily sustainable per se, but these are structures of validation that the majority of us is familiar and comfortable with —not only ‘us’, but also the inhabitants of shrinking cities.

An increasing number of registration schemes, digital and analogue -followers in social media, awards, funding, and spiritual insights-, feed the myth of accelerationism and growth. Understanding how the same principles, rules or distribution of power are working across different levels of magnification— ranging from the city and the organization to the individual—, we can start subverting growth, corrupting power, imagining how it is to challenge the hegemonic structure from the inside, abusing terminologies and codes, expanding the discourse, and crashing the party that we weren’t invited to.

Welcome to the headquarters of the Degrowth Institute.

future@metasitu.com