Curating change: Spatial utopian politics and the architecture of degrowth

Abstract

Geographical scholarship has done much to help us understand how we have arrived at the current juncture of socio-ecological disaster, but the discipline has been far less successful at imagining and enacting alternative systems and practices. In response, this paper examines the potentials and challenges for creative geographers to build critical projects that consider how socio-ecological alternatives might be imagined and/or enacted. The focus is on the author’s own experience as a geographer curating the Oslo Architecture Triennale 2019 with the radical theme of “degrowth.” The paper focuses on the critical-creative methodologies as well as politics of architecture stemming from this curatorial experiment.