On 12 December 2024, the Dutch CoNECT team hosted a symposium on 'Design Pedagogies for a Post-Growth Future' to bring spatial researchers and educators together around the question: Can we envision futures beyond consumerist, growth-oriented societies? What would this mean for circularity in the construction industry, indoor thermal comfort, or the design of public and green urban spaces? And what are the implications for architectural and urban design education? The symposium was held at the Trappenzaal at Eindhoven University of Technology and also served as the closing event of the exhibition 'Together Tomorrow: Reimagining Every Practices'.
Dr. Oana Druta introduced the subject of the symposium in the context of in the context of the contemporary polycrisis (climate change, overconsumption, inequality, polarization...) or, in slightly euphemistic terms, the 'great societal challenges' that we face and which universities try to prepare students for. To these she added the 'crisis of hope' which students, educators and practitioners often come up against: are we really able to imagine and believe in positive futures in the face of these crises? Here she introduced post-growth thinking as a radical and hopeful strategy for rethinking our world beyond the crises of contemporary capitalist life and the cycles we appear locked into. She pointed that design pedagogies are a particularly hopeful place to start, offering educators and future designers a way to critically rethink architecture's complicity in growth-based industries and practices, and the ability of design to reshape imaginaries of the future.
Our first speaker, Dr. Alejandro de Castro Mazarro, started off by challenging the normative idea of the 'good' city: what makes a city good, and how do we measure this? Often we think designing is about giving people what they want, but Alejandro compared this mentality to eating too much candy and chocolate: it might be what we want and enjoy in the short term, but ultimately it can cause debilitating and life-threatening illness without us noticing. It might be necessary to recognize that the good, healthy city is not the same as the 'nice', fun city of our consumerist urges. He also pointed out that theories of 'the good city' still tend to follow the ecomodernist script that technological progress and economic growth will eventually lead to greater efficiency, equality and overall quality of life; but looking at the material evidence, this is simply not true. Alejandro's recent work therefore looks at the material reality of architectural and production: how much steel and concrete is actually used in even 'sustainable' European building projects, where do these resources come from, and what is their extraction doing to landscapes around the world?
The theme of the wanting it all in the short-term rather than understanding well-being in the longer term was echoed in Dr. Lenneke Kuijer's presentation about designing for an 'eco-harmonist' persona rather than the 'techno-hedonist' that dominates contemporary design imaginaries. Working from a social practice perspective, Lenneke discussed the ways in which the designed 'stuff' around us accumulates, stacks and accelerates as we delegate more and more of our tasks and responsibilities to technology. This desire for convenience, ease and smoothness results in experiences of deskilling, artificialization and disempowerments; and by designing for an imagined persona with these desires, designers perpetuate these technologies and processes. Instead, Lenneke proposes flipping this around and designing instead for an imagined 'eco-harmonist': someone who is willing, even eager, to invest some time and effort, learn new skills, and change their expectations of 'normal' contemporary life. She points out that by designing for this persona, we put this imaginary into the world, and can make products and processes which do change people's practices and therefore their expectations and desires, just as designing only for the techno-hedonist turns us all into techno-hedonists.
Dr. Corelia Baibarac-Duignan's presentation on affective 'rurban' encounters built on the ideas of changing people's conceptions of normality through practice, and rethinking our (extractive, dominating, functionalist) relationship to land and to nature, and the divide between urban and rural, as an essential part of sustainability transitions. Using projects in the Lutkemeerpolder (a contested site on the Amsterdam's urban-rural border) and the University of Twente campus, she showed how designers and educators can use artistic practice to defamiliarize people, making the 'normal' strange and allowing people to reflect critically on their assumptions and habits while experiencing a radically different way of relating to land, water and more-than-human life ('how do we listen to the soil if worms don't speak English...?'). Through these 'situated rurban encounters', participants are encouraged to relate to landscape not in terms of green infrastructure but rather green intimacies.
The three talks made clear that moving beyond growth-based ideologies is not as simple as teaching new methods and techniques within existing systems. Rather, design pedagogies for a transformed future must themselves transform: exploring new ways of understanding and engaging with the world around us; developing new ways of communicating design (if you draw a degrowth proposal using conventional architectural tools, 'it just looks like nothing', Alejandro points out); and reimagining the personas we design for. Pedagogy can also be a method of transforming subjectivities, helping both students and educators to develop more harmonious and rewarding relationships with their environment and thus changing the way they will design for and intervene in that environment - suggesting not only more sustainable but also more equitable and representational future cities and landscapes.
The recorded talks will be uploaded on YouTube soon along with previous CoNECT webinars.
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