Existing Housing for Futures Beyond Growth : Reconfiguring the Relations of Everyday Life

Sammanfattning

This thesis examines the relationship between growth dependency, housing, and the spatial organisation of everyday life. Drawing on theories of everyday life, hegemony, and degrowth, it argues that economic growth is reproduced not only through economic systems and institutions, but also through the environments through which everyday life is organised. Through processes of industrialisation, welfare-state modernisation, and contemporary development, many of the relations through which life is sustained have become increasingly externalised from everyday experience. Housing has played a central role in this process, helping to normalise particular relationships to labour, resources, landscape, and community. Focusing on Övre Norrland, the northernmost region of Sweden, whose landscapes have been shaped by successive projects of colonisation, industrial extraction, welfare-state development, and contemporary green industrialisation, the thesis traces how these processes have become materially embedded within the existing housing stock. Particular attention is given to the Swedish welfare housing of the Million Programme as a materialisation of a socio-spatial model of growth-dependent modern everyday life. Situated within a Million Programme housing cluster in Skellefteå, a municipality at the centre of Sweden’s green transition, the design project explores how the existing housing stock might be reconfigured to support alternative relationships to labour, resources, landscape, and collective life. Through a strategy of incremental transformation based on on-site reuse, material circulation, and resident agency, the project redistributes material and activities across the apartment, facade, and courtyard. In doing so, it seeks to create conditions through which relations that have become increasingly externalised may once again become part of everyday experience, while simultaneously internalising resources, labour, knowledge, and decision-making within the transformation process itself. The project therefore investigates how the existing housing stock might function as a site through which the socio-spatial relations embedded within it can be questioned, renegotiated, and transformed. It explores how architecture may contribute to post-growth futures by opening possibilities for alternative forms of relating in everyday life.