Modelling Urban Degrowth

A workshop

by METASITU with: Grant Penfield Haugen Aneta Kohoutová Joanna Łałowska Annela Samuel Anni Saviaro

(Re)configuring Territories Summer School Narva 2022

A few years ago, while we were visiting Riga, we asked for directions on how to get to a particular hotel from a local bystander standing in the middle of a large tree-lined avenue.

Do you see the birch trees over there? After the birch trees, go to the left for three blocks. This seemingly unassuming way of giving directions, where not only trees, but a specific type of tree was used as a geo-indicator in an urban setting, revealed something to us that we were not aware of until that point: we did not know how birch trees looked like, or how to distinguish them from the other trees that lined up the street.

This encounter revealed not only how language affects and shapes our perception of space, but also the cartographic bias that we project onto the most anthropocentric of habitats -the urban realm- when we draw maps that include only buildings but not trees, especially when the latter are older than the former. Time is important in this perception because most of us will be outlived by the urban environments that surround us, which is perhaps why we think of cities as something that will necessarily outlive our human lives and are unable to register or, rather, accept, when they are in a shrinking phase.

Urbanization is perceived as something so removed from the natural world that we do not consider it to be subject to the same cycles as other natural elements are: unlike trees, we expect buildings to exist forever. This logic also applies to cities, and how we design them: master planning is implicit in capitalist rhetoric- starting from a tabula rasa, the city accumulates resources, territories, and people; expanding, infinitely.

Growth takes place in different ways, yet, within spatial sciences and territorial planning, success indicators are often perceived as growth along two vectors: population and economy.

To us, at METASITU, ‘urban degrowth’ is not about going against urban expansionism and accumulation, but rather about recalibrating the way we understand cities so that we can start thinking of possibilities or alternatives to development other than economic or population growth. Rather than understanding the degrowth as reverting

growth, stopping development, or demolition, we understand it as any transformation that doesn’t have ‘growth’ at its core or goal.

It is a fluid definition. A definition that we are constantly adjusting, debating about, and reshaping, because we have not been trained to think of alternatives, and seven years on, this still feels like new territory, we are still traversing multitudes.

Urban fabrics are complex social formations, and we often lack the tools or imagination to think of these alternative vectors of development, but if we are to take a smaller, and thus simpler, formation such as a family, we often find it easier to understand degrowth in spatial terms: Traditionally in parts of the World where intergenerational dwellings are not common when a family of empty nesters decides to ‘scale down’ by buying a smaller property once their children have moved out of the house, it is a process that involves discussion, preparation.

It deals with memories, and parents, who remain the only dwellers of the property, often consult with their children - who no longer live there but are somehow still tied to the property through memories, and certain things that they might still have from their younger years.

Some things might go into storage, some others might be given away or Marie Kondo-ed. But the parents would eventually move to a smaller, and more manageable, unit, more suitable to their present needs.

Having empty-nesters insisting on continuing to procreate just to keep their homes filled with people would be a preposterous thought, yet, this is how many cities that are shrinking continue to operate. In many shrinking cities that we visited, the role of their chief architects has largely been transformed from territorial planning, to actively attracting new people, and convincing others to stay, into some sort of PR twist.

What would happen if that energy that municipalities continue to spend on attracting new jobs and new people to their shrinking towns, went instead towards designing a master plan that accepted its ebbing population rather than fought against it? What would other urban futures look like that did not have growth at their core? In other words, how could we ´masterplan for degrowth´?

In a way there is a clear route to follow: one that consists of taming wild lands, attracting new businesses through financial incentives, injecting concrete foundations into the ground, and building more despite high vacancy. This is what we, as architects, have often been taught at school.

Different, mostly post-industrial, shrinking urban centers around the world have tried different ways of dealing with their ebbing populations: from dramatically denying their shrinking condition to incentive plans to recover population numbers, to ´smart decline´ tactics that claimed to embrace ´degrowth´, when they largely consisted on demolishing entire neighborhoods, that whereas they might have been empty of people, they remained filled with memories, and their destruction left entire communities that had once lived there feeling disenfranchised that their childhood home had violently been razed to the ground.

Many post-Soviet post-industrial towns are becoming paradigms of urban shrinkage, a supposedly tragic reversal of that accelerationist and expansionist planning logic. As we continued our research in these post-industrial centers, we struggled in adapting some of the ´degrowth´ literature to urbanism and master planning and situate it in the post-Soviet context. A lot of the degrowth language, at least in the contexts we were operating with, has been forged in Western Europe: in affluent areas where degrowth was, in many ways, a choice – where degrowth is a suggested strategy that can lead to other paradigms: from ecological balance to financial redistribution to de-accelerationism.

This is not the case for shrinking post-industrial towns, as they are subject to the violence implicit in capitalist peripheries: extractivism, lack of opportunity, mismanagement of toxic waste, etc. Not planning for degrowth further exacerbates this violence. It is, thus, important to establish that this form of degrowth was not a choice, but the undertow of global flows of capital, where population flows follow trade, and landscapes are traded.

Emptied post-industrial centers are often ‘rewilded’, fulfilling the fantasies of other urbanites, followers of the ruin porn of which industrial decay has impregnated so many imaginaries. Yet,

rewilding is a process of othering nature, one of nature vs human, of extracting ourselves out of the natural world, and perpetuating false binaries of artificial as a human creation, and natural as the result of divine intervention. Can we still think of anything natural in the time of climate change? Can we think of artificial when we, as many other animals continue to do, are modifying elements to adequate them to our habitats?

We suggest thinking instead of rewilding as a finite point, as a spectrum of what is under a perceived form of human control and what isn’t. That form of epistemologically relinquishing control of our built and unbuilt environments transcends the binary of the natural and the unnatural and allows us to think of degrowth as a process.

A problem that immediately arises when thinking of urban degrowth is that of what methodologies to use to plan for degrowth. Unlike growth-based master planning, where you start with a ´tabula rasa´(or rather, the perception of a ´tabula rasa´, for no landscape is ever just ´nothing´), when planning for degrowth one is facing a territory layered with histories, meanings, and politics. No one solution fits all.

In this context of planning for degrowth, top-down approaches no longer work: it is the inhabitants, spatial users, past and present, who all share a level of expertise. Master Planning experts can become facilitators at best, but leave enough room to allow those who are part of the shrinking city to manifest their ideas. It is not necessarily about going bottom-up and hoping that grassroots initiatives would take over the control of the process, for these processes can also be populated with trojan horses in the form of developers and lobbyists. We need to think about this process sideways - everyone has something to bring: from city council representatives, spatial planning experts, and inhabitants - but also three-dimensionally, for it is a process that involves different timelines, a continuum with unclear ends.

To start this sort of conversation we need new vocabularies, and new tools, that allow for cognitive emancipation for the traditional vectors of growth. It is a conversation of uncertainty. Of new territories. How can we start talking?

This set of conditions marked the beginning of The Degrowth Institute.

The Degrowth Institute is an initiative founded in 2015 by METASITU, with the aim of establishing emancipatory narratives in shrinking postindustrial cities, and has since evolved through multiple iterations of exhibitions, workshops, and publications.

The Degrowth Institute was born to emancipate urban master planning from traditional growth vectors, particularly when success is only measured through ‘growth-based indicators’ (more residents, more budget, more houses)By institutionalizing our practice, we wanted to de-institutionalize territorial decision-making. We wanted to co-create tools with different groups of urban activists in different shrinking cities that would help us navigate the ocean of other vectors we meant by ´degrowth´.

The Degrowth Institute mostly operated in Donbas (Eastern Ukraine), where we teamed up with local grassroots organizations and met with different stakeholders to discuss degrowth futures for their towns. Ruinification, preservation, and rewilding spectrums were some of the things we discussed in our quest for alternatives to growth to determine the successful development of a settlement.

In our methodology, we developed the main tool, The Degrowth Manual, around which we organized workshops.

The Degrowth Manual which was created as a fire-cracker publication: a series of activities, and questions that were designed to ignite conversations among different actors who lived in shrinking cities towards non-growth futures.

Conceived as a bilingual (Russian and English) self-guided and selfcontained horizontal workshop to be done individually or collectively, it was designed as open source to be easily downloadable. The Degrowth Manual is also metamorphosical in nature, as every edition is adapted, based on the feedback received from the previous iterations.

The publication proposes new ways of looking at the urban realm: not just through the un-human lens of the plan through which most territorial decisions are made, but rather, through more human approaches such as memories, social media, time capsules, and alternative cartographies.

As one goes through the manual, there is a simultaneous process of growth – as the pages collect information, memories, and ideas from the participants – and shrinkage – as the pages are cut off to use in different activities. This seemingly oxymoronic duality of collection and dematerialization is one that we came across at different times throughout our work.

One of the sections has a Degrowth Tarot, offering a deck of specially-designed cards to be cut out to fortune-tell alternative futures, allowing us to start wishful thinking outside the tentacles of growth. Or attempt to.

We normally held multiple-day workshops, where we always partnered up with local organizations and invited different stakeholders and volunteers who were paid for their participation, as experts of the local city, who shared their lived experiences with us.

At the end of the workshops, participants would trade filled-out Degrowth Manuals for blank ones: the former forming part of the Degrowth Archive (currently in Kyiv), the latter becoming a tool to utilize again in another setting, individually or with other people, to design other workshops to think of non-extractive urban futures, if they wished.

At the (Re)Configuring Territories Spring School organized by the collective Trojan Horse and celebrated in June 2022 at the Narva Artist Residency, we explored new models for talking about degrowth, particularly in post-industrial shrinking cities, like Narva.

Narva, a former textile center, lies on the Estonian side of the border between Russia and the European Union; a border that has gained new layers of significance these recent months with the atrocities that the Russian Army is carrying out in Ukraine.

Yet, the border remains somewhat porous for many of the inhabitants of Narva, where half of the population either holds a passport from the Russian Federation or a ‘gray passport’, a certificate of statelessness that allows its carrier to travel to Russia without a visa. A border that is very present on the ground, yet, at a subterranean level, Narva and Ivangorod, the city across the river, shared the same water and sanitation network until 1994. A border that is fluid in the air, as our phones jump between Estonian and Russian operators depending on which communication tower is closer.

In this context, together with the participants Anni Saviaro, Joanna Łałowska, Aneta Kohoutová, Annela Samuel, and Grant Penfield Haugen, we tried to develop tools that would help us address the materiality of shrinking cities, and position them in timelines.

How do the elements that make up a city sit in non-human timelines?

How can we, collectively, talk and think about the materiality of a city? Why do we need to record the materiality of a shrinking city in the context of urban degrowth?

Working in the footsteps of what once was one of the largest textile centers in the world, the Kremholm Factory, which now lies empty and rapidly deteriorating, we thought of ruins and deep time. The romanticization of destruction, the crumbling temples, and castles are powerful economic engines in different locations across the globe.

At The Degrowth Institute, we often saw ruins and ruinification as a spatial typology and process that embody transformational degrowth potential. It diverts a space from its ‘intended’ course of action: A ruin can represent various narratives – such as degradation, heritage, or memory to name a few. It can be intricately linked to the ideas of preservation and restoration of the material evidence of memories.

Ruins to be cared about and ruins to be left to ruin. In the capitalist thought though it represents a failure – a future that could, but did not happen. Perhaps something that could explain the general consensus among spatial practitioners to regenerate, demolish, or preserve ruins.

To transform them out of the state of ruin. We propose to think about ruins as potentialities - as futures that could happen.

By testing different exercises throughout our time at the Spring School, we tried to understand what sort of conversations these would trigger.

The first exercise we developed was one to do with building a sort of material archive. Whereas archival-building and collecting can have very strong connections to colonial understandings of the land, imposing order, control, documentation, and classification, we propose to create an archive that is not necessarily connected to collecting, to extractive processes, but rather, to thinking about it from a personal perspective, an assemblage without gatekeepers or access points. A group of material significance.

How to record intangibility? How to transcend the limitations of our own devices? Of our own human scale? Of the size of our hands that we used to pick things, and of our pockets where we stored what we collected? How to capture ephemeral moments? How to record ghosts? How to capture the thundering sound of the Narva waterfalls, which are some of Europe’s strongest, when the river is not flowing?

We ended up with a tapestry of objects, new memories, and unrecordable elements some of which now populate the pages of this zine, in essence, or in part. We ended up with a crumble of timelines, some ‘materials’ lasting fractions of a second, others being the result of geological formations from millions of years ago. Some materials withering over the course of the week, like the weeds we collected, others that will withstand millennia in their current form, like polystyrene.

It’s the same big wall. We can see the material is the same but its patterns are different. The more you look at the wall, the more differences you will find. And finally, local people, communities based on their own personal and collective memories still give meaning to this wall, as well as to other things.

Open dialogue with place and people - respect, care

The multiplicity of relationships

Without knowing the experiences and memories of the past and the present of the inhabitants and place - the new future can not be created.

The space/place opens up the need for a move beyond materiality to a wider community/multi focal orientation.

The material must be examined in a broader context, not only physically, but also symbolically - semiotically what is the peoples experiences and memories behind it.

one wall - different patterns one place- different voices, memories

materiality

-

physical and

semiotic

pluralistic position

collaborative meaning

-

making process

- changes

A second tool we developed consisted of a visualization of the lifecycles of ruins. An adaptation of the Shearing Layers diagram by Stewart Brand, based on Frank Duffy´s ideas of the different lifespans of the materials that made up a house.

What would that look like if we were to adapt it to a city? We identified a series of elements based on their life cycles: site, climate, heritage, ruins, trees, humans, housing units, memories, communities, infrastructure, non-human animals, flora, clothes and stuff, insects, festivals, events, camps, food, weather, and market stalls.

How quickly or how slow the turnover and the life cycle of these elements depends on multiple factors, but we thought of using this diagram as a conversation starter: can we see relational patterns emerging between the different elements. It was interesting to understand how some elements such as site, climate, trees, or flora, elements of our urban fabric, can remain on the site even in the event of a shrinking city, helping us to understand urban shrinkage as a human-center element, but one that did not necessarily leave just ‘nothing’, but that would allow us to visualize degrowth as a transformative process rather than a final one.

Degrowth is a conversation of uncertainty, of things that are not clear. A conversation in the making, a conversation that raises more questions than provides answers. Urban Degrowth is not just applicable to shrinking cities but provides us a way to relate to our surroundings, and to one another. Degrowth is not a destination, but a journey; a series of landscapes made of processes, unfinished, under works. A future continuum.

climate heritage trees human housing memories community infrastructure non-human animals flora clothes insects events/festivals food weather market

site

maybe you cannot which color is your passport? i see you crossing

the bridge goes across i am not allowed on it sending peace your way

i am sending mir mirror mirror on the wall your are the fairest

border over there i am not allowed to go but do you see me?

restricted movement divided over river how are you doing?

i am not allowed are they even seeing me? i see your presence

when are we able? i want to see you closer i want your presence

goods going across i have to stay on this side passport determines

you’re waving to me not fake communication genuine from the heart

from cold to heated separated by the water the unknown side

thoughts on degrowth /Anni Saviaro ...

Degrowth can be understood as a negative to growth, meaning a reduction of an economy or a population. In our growth obsessed society, it might have quite a negative connotation. But does anything really grow endlessly?

Doesn’t everything have some kind of a life cycle?

What does that mean in a context of a city?

In a context of urban planning there is a problem in a variety of areas suffering from experiences of feeling left out. It has been argued that continuous growth as an ideological construction has never been realistic and its last foundations have disappeared with strong urbanization. At the same time urban planning is portrayed as growth-dependent and struggling to respond to concept of degrowth.

What could degrowth mean?

How we could approach places without feeling the need to be connected to the aim of economical or population growth? ... are these places, where there is reduction of population, left out of sight, out of mind? are they just left behind? ...

Is there feeling of sadness, melancholy or apathy?

Or is there, or could there be, some kind of relief from the need to grow?

Freedom to do, to be, to create? ...

By growth we usually mean increasing the quantity of something. Juho Rajaniemi suggests that the term growth is often confused with the terms development and progress. Rajaniemi argues that development means a change in some direction, but progress as a change is tied to values as it means a change for the better. According to Rajaniemi, the terms development and progress are also often used as synonyms, although they are not. Also it can be portrayed in way that growth provides a framework for increasing the quantity of things and at the same time, through changing the environment, it creates the illusion of qualitative change. (Rajaniemi 2006, p. 49) Hanna Kosunen also highlights the metaphors associated with growth, according to which all good moves forward and upward. These metaphors are easy to embrace because they resemble the idea of personal and human progress. (Kosunen 2021) “In the growth society, growth itself is the issue second to none. With the help of zoning, growth can be translated into numbers, building volumes, measures, areas and so create the illusion of the environment’s growth. A planning system, which dominates the living environment of the human being under society’s and companies’ need for growth, is devoid of human dignity. Our environment is nothing but quality. It does not grow.

It can only change.” (Rajaniemi 2006) ...

When not looking cities and planning only in a quantitative way it can open up a whole lot new perspectives. During the time in Narva, we build our undestanding towards cities, our living environment or habitat, as collection of many different things and materiality: humans, communities, events, buildings, infrastructure, all sorts of materials, scales, public spaces, private spaces, flora, non-human living beings, air, water, the ground, smells, soundscapes, heritage, but also intangible things such as memories, history or urban or societal rituals.

Cities can also be seen from non-human perspective where degreasing of human population and human control is also not necessarily a bad thing althought some non-human animals, for example, might benefit of humans. ...

What is a life cycle of a city? What will last longest?

Will other things flourish when some others fade?

Some things will last only minutes, hours or days some will last weeks, months or years, some decades or centuries, Some even infinity? ∞

...

Also, is there limit to growth?

Among theories of different stages of growth, one is by Lewis Mumford, in which he presented a classification of six-tiered urban development.

This classification is skeptical towards endless continuous growth. The first three stages of a city in this classification are eopolis, polis, and metropolis, and the last three are already stages of decay: megalopolis, tyrannopolis, and necropolis. However, according to the classification, not all cities end up in a necropolis, and touring is possible. According to Mumford, the only sure thing is that as the city moved to the megalopolis stage, its decline has begun. (According to Rajaniemi 2006, Mumford 1949) Notable this is from human standpoint and looks city as one entity.

Also the idea that economic growth would always increase people’s well-being is increasingly being questioned. GDP has been an example: its growth has been found to significantly improve people’s well-being in countries with low annual per capita incomes. However, in a situation where per capita income levels are rising above a certain threshold, it has seemed that GDP growth will no longer increase people’s satisfaction

with their lives. In addition, the benefits of growth have been found to be unevenly distributed in society, leading to economic inequality and societal tensions. (Kosunen 2021) “(G)rowth-dependent planning may reinforce economic inequality because its principle is to replace existing urban functions with activities that people are willing to pay more for. In this way, the city might develop to meet the needs of better-off urban dwellers, while the needs of low-income residents are in danger of being ignored.” (Kosunen 2021, p. 17) ...

During the days in Narva, we talked about degrowth from neutral starting point where it could mean development not in one particular direction but multiple it cannot be easily measured and is connected to values it could be way of avoiding hard data and finding new ways it could mean letting go of the control letting things evolve “organically” considering “belonging” to a particular location coming terms with reality collective care reciprocal relationship with the natural world respect understanding and appreciating finity emancipation of labor centric models (universal income) cultural curator.

We talked about ruins, memories, values, meanings in built environment after it is not in human “use” anymore. What could downsizing a city actually mean? Could it lead to more agreeable or more comfortable environment? What could the buildings or the places to demolish? ...

Urban planning is seen as an activity that needs some kind of justification, as the choices and decisions made by urban planners affect people’s living environment (Schmitt & Hartmann 2012) as well as the value of land, directly and indirectly (Rajaniemi 2006). Planning choices can be controversial or “make people poorer or richer”, which strongly links urban planning to equity. Indeed, it has been suggested that the ethical dimension in decisions that shape our living environment is inseparable from the physical dimension of the city. (Schmitt & Hartmann 2012) Urban planning and the plans can be justified in multiple ways, but if the justification is monorational it might face lot of resistance. Justification has been done throught designer’s professionalism, statutory process, scientific working method or positive economic effects (Rajaniemi 2006).

The justification of planning practices can be also connected with two different conceptions of democracy, deliberative and liberal, combining them with an input- and output-oriented ways of legitimacy (Mäntysalo, Saglie & Cars 2011). Justification of planning approaches derived from Mary Douglas’s cultural theory can be combined with three different concepts of justice: utilitarian, libertarian, and social justice (Schmitt & Hartmann 2012).

One can recognize the shift in the social and political climate that from the mid-1980s moved towards an economic-driven neoliberal world based on thought that favors a free market and avoids planning. At the zoning or urban planning level, the change has been reflected in a change towards the ways of operating that are familiar to the business world.

At the same time, one can recognize a shift from the goal of common good towards goal of international competitiveness (Puustinen et al.

2016), where economic growth alone can be presented as a public good

(Rajaniemi 2006). Even though public good can be seen challenging as a term, it has been considered being the heart of public legitimacy (Puustinen et al. 2016). ...

Degrowth could offer possibility for changing the environment through small informal interventions. Degrowth could mean that there is no need to rush. There could be use of stagnation in very positive way: there could be time to rest without pressure to grow. Time to think what would actually be needed. Or what could be nice and delightful. There can be enchantment in degrowth. small steps, small changes, all in time. ... ”Three levels of style or aesthetics are known in Japanese poetry, art, and beauty: cool, withered, and leathery.” ”The beauty of the leathery, yase, reflects beauty at its highest level.

It depicts the development of the trained eye and aesthetic sensitivity through the cool and withered phase to the climax, the leathery beauty.

The beauty of the leathery has been described in ancient literature in terms such as snow on mountain slopes or as trees in mid-winter, like the fruit of a previous summer left hanging from a branch of a snow-covered persimmon tree, now frost-bitten, dark and wrinkled.”

(Eväsoja 2018, p. 115-116) ...

There is need for more empathy.

Literature: Eväsoja, M. 2018. Shoshin - aloittelijan mieli: Japanilaisia ajatuksia ja ajatuksia Japanista. Gummerus.

Kosunen, H. 2021. Urban planning approaches for low-growth contexts: A case study on the development of existing built environment in Finnish suburbs. Oulu: University of Oulu.

Mäntysalo, R., Saglie, I-L. & Cars, G. 2011. Between Input Legitimacy and Output Efficiency: Defensive Routines and Agonistic Reflectivity in Nordic Land-Use Planning, European Planning Studies, 19:12, 21092126.

Puustinen, S., Mäntysalo, R. & Jarenko, K. 2017. Yleisen edun moninaiset tulkinnat: Jäsennystä yhdyskuntasuunnittelijoiden käsitysten analysointiin. The Finnish Society of Urban Planning.

Rajaniemi, J. 2006. Kasvun kaavoitus: Tapaus Raahe 1961-1996.

Kankaanpää: Messon.

Schmitt, S-M., & Hartmann, T. 2016. Clumsy City by Design—A Theory for Jane Jacobs’ Imperfect Cities? Urban Planning, 2016, Volume 1, Issue 4, Pages 42–50.