60 541 Post-growth: designing for transitional societies in a climate altered world (Spring 2026)

The studio has two points of departure. One is a Sámi context, focusing on Kautokeino, a Sámi core area in Norway. The other is how climate change and its connected crises will radically alter our futures, requiring a restructuring of societies and our professions. Climate change is tied to how we distribute and consume resources, locked into extractive growth models that exceed planetary limits. The course explores transitional strategies beyond Eurocentric and technocratic approaches, focusing on a post-growth future in Sápmi. Through deep colonial injustices and power imbalances Sápmi has become fragmented spaces, cultures, and ecologies cut through by regulatory frameworks, nation state interests, infrastructures, and resource extraction. In these territories exist other ways of thinking that provide alternative inroads to concepts of climactic, ecological, and social stability, inviting for critical reassessment of how we build communities, design buildings, use environments, and interact with landscapes.

After successfully completing the course, you have acquired the following knowledge:

• Apply transitional thinking to our fields from a Sápmi perspective.
• Assess ways in which to approach complexity, crisis, and other cultural contexts.
• Recognize the connectedness between climate change, landscapes, built environments, political instability, and social disparities.
• Put into perspective our fields’ roles in preparedness building.

You have acquired the following skills:

• Gather, analyse, and present complex data and information. Creating interdisciplinary strategies for tackling such problems, and visualising and communicating these.
• Apply theories of transition discourse, climate justice, global urbanism, pluriversality, and post humanism in concrete suggestions for moving beyond the current state of affairs.
• Learn to use futures studies and scenario building methods

You have acquired the following general competence:

• Develop the ability to learn from, communicate, and collaborate with a range of actors, people from different backgrounds, working in interdisciplinary teams to strengthen own profession.
• Work in other cultures and in radically different futures.
• Develop an understanding of changes that are increasingly affecting communities and natural landscapes across the globe including Nordic regions.

Module 1. Suggesting immediate interventions for a climate altered post growth future in Sápmi and Kautokeino.

Module 2. Knowledge building: understanding climate research, understanding Sápmi and Kautokeino, understanding post-growth and transition discourses.

Module 3. Studying and critically analyzing contemporary public architecture in a Sámi context.

Module 4. Scenario building and storytelling.

Module 5: Design phase. It will be possible to design on a building level, or to work at a more overarching, strategic level. 

Excursion:
As the course focuses on Sami culture and climate issues in Sápmi, a study trip to Kautokeino will provide significant input and is strongly recommended. Parts of the studio budget will go towards facilitating the fieldwork, but it will be necessary for students to cover some of the costs. For those not able to join an alternative assignment will be provided.

Form of assessment: Portfolio assessment

Grouping: Group assessment

Grading scale: Pass/fail

The course consists of five modules that together make up the students’ portfolios. Students are required to present their work at the end of each module. Module 1 is individual; all other modules are team based. The modules build on each other with a final assessment of the portfolio at the end of module 5.