Angela Ruth Kivle

• Kivle, Angela (2022). Justice and the design of urban landscapes: Perspectives from practice in re-opening Oslo's Alna river. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This paper explores how planning and design practitioners in Oslo’s river and stream opening projects operate within critical environmental justice perspectives. Re-opening the Alna river in Oslo’s Grorud Valley is part of a government-led strategy to improve water quality, counter habitat fragmentation, and elevate public health. Left unscrutinised, the implicit assumption is that re-opening Oslo’s waterways will result in a ‘more just’ public realm. To remedy this, I firstly conducted research through interviews with landscape architects and planners surrounding Oslo’s river openings to understand how they operate within critical perspectives of justice. Distributive equity emerged in the allocation of four parks, one to each of the Grorud Valley’s four boroughs through public investment under the first Grorud Initiative (2007-2016). The goal of the Grorud Initiative, continuing today in its second phase, is to improve living conditions in Oslo’s Grorud Valley by elevating the quality of open space, playgrounds, and walking trails in the district. One of the four parks funded under the Initiative, the Grorud Park, provides my empirical case. Secondly, I explored the theme of relationality using qualitative methods of observation, narrative writing, photography, and spatial analysis of the design elements at the Grorud Park. I conclude with insights into the ways design practice strives to improve well-being within the constraints of government-led greening, nuancing what Isabelle Anguelovski and James Connolly call relationality in The Green City and Social Injustice (2021).

• Kivle, Angela (2022). Social sustainability and urban landscapes: Perspectives from the Alna. Full text in Research Archive
• Kivle, Angela (2022). Surfacing justice in the design of fluid space: Re-opening Oslo’s Alna river. Full text in Research Archive
• Kivle, Angela (2021). Diverse practices to uncover perspectives of justice in the restoration of urban rivers. Full text in Research Archive
• Kivle, Angela; Hemmersam, Peter & Müller, Sabine (2025). Unforced coexistence : reconceptualising open space planning in Oslo through environmental justice and affordances theory. Arkitektur- og designhøgskolen i Oslo. ISSN 9788254703786. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  For over twenty years, open space planning in Oslo, Norway, has been driven by the vision of creating a greener, more equitable city. However, greening remains a contested term in urban design, planning and landscape research. Without an understanding of the nuances of how public open spaces are used, designers risk applying universalised assumptions about everyday use to suburban greening projects. This study used the theoretical framework of critical environmental justice, encompassing distributive, procedural, and recognition justice, to examine the norms made explicit in strategic planning documents and among designers involved in daylighting projects in Oslo. Through a spatial analysis of landscape architectural drawings, walking interviews, as well as an analysis of planning documents and promotional material, this thesis first sought to understand the norms and assumptions in the planning documents and among designers. Secondly, in order to question and nuance these normative assumptions, direct observations of everyday use were conducted in two daylighting projects in Osloʼs Grorud Valley between April 2021 and February 2023: Grorud Park and Byggerʼn Activity Park. The everyday use of suburban parks was approached through the theoretical concept of affordances, rooted in environmental psychology, which highlights the often unseen interactions in open spaces between people and the environments they inhabit. Examining the two case studies through the lens of recognition justice and affordance theory revealed a dissonance between the terminology used by designers and in strategic policy documents, and how these open spaces were actually used. Drawing on affordances theory, this thesis introduces four relational terms—touch, leave, merge and diverge—to provide an awareness of the dynamic moments of ebb and flow, nearing and distancing between users in these two parks in low–density neighbourhoods on the urban periphery. When the environment invites both proximity and distance, as well as encounter and avoidance, users of public open spaces can interact with each other in ways that help them to manage their differences—what I call an environment of unforced coexistence.

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