Post-pandemic Urbanis

13 Phineas Harper and Maria Smith
More than
Enough!
A Dialog on Degrowth and the COVID-19 Disaster
Degrowth is an economic theory proposing a designed reduction
of resource consumption in wealthy societies to bring net human
activity in line with planetary limits while lowering inequality and
nurturing cultural and ecological flourishing. For decades, many
environmental economists, philosophers, and artists have been
exploring the functional and aesthetic possibilities of an economy
that is no longer reliant on endless growth, but rarely have those
ideas been tested on the urban landscape. In 2019, the Oslo
Architecture Triennale, a Norwegian architecture festival titled
“Enough: The Architecture of Degrowth,” put degrowth at the heart
of its curatorial agenda, with a program of performance, science
fiction, and installations exhibiting many architectural and spatial
proposals for what degrowth could mean for contemporary cities.
Here, two of the Triennale’s chief curators, engineer and architect
Maria Smith and critic Phineas Harper, reflect on degrowth in the
light of the COVID-19 catastrophe and ask why architecture seems
so rooted in a paradigm of infinite economic expansion.
Phineas Harper: The first case of COVID-19 was recorded on
November 17, 2019, one week before the conclusion of the Oslo
Architecture Triennale. The Triennale’s participants sought to
imagine a society with almost no aviation; in which workers spent
less time commuting and more time at home; in which cities
embraced walking and cycling, and the complex, high-carbon consumerism
of wealthy societies gave way to low-impact pastimes—
reading, board games, DIY, handicrafts, gardening, and long walks.
The Triennale imagined a world in which mutual aid networks