Oikology - Home Ecologics

Basic information

Project Title

Full project title

Oikology - Home Ecologics: a book about making our home together on Earth

Project Description

This book is for people who want to make homes within Earth’s limits in their personal or professional lives. It proposes 'Oikology – Home ecologics' as a field of knowledge and practice to meet critical challenges of climate change and social segregation. It provides hands-on advice akin to that offered in home economics classes, through speculative scenarios, a set of cruxes to be bounced into the planning process, methods for transdisciplinary co-creation and 29 recipes for home making.

Project Region

Växjö, Sweden

EU Programme or fund

Description of the project

Summary

The project we enter is a book, resulting from a three-year (2016–19) long research and development project exploring how, at the regional level, all sectors in collaboration can make viable homes on Earth in a time of mass extinction, climate change and social segregation.

In the book Oikology – Home Ecologics two interplaying housing crises converge. The first concerns affordable and suitable housing for groups unprioritised by the housing market: older persons, students and migrants. The second concerns our home on Earth: science gives us but a decade to avert catastrophic climate change. This book aims at both reporting on research in the project BOOST and providing hands-on advice akin to that offered in home economics classes. The book starts performing Oikology – Home ecologics, a field of knowledge and practice in times of complexity, messiness and never finished labour of making homes together within Earth’s limits. The exploration of housing development for older persons, students and migrants in a context of sustainability was carried out through processes of co-creation in urban and rural parts of Småland, southern Sweden. Metadesign – an uncompromisingly systemic design approach, enabled a holistic and systemic take on home making integrating different dimensions of sustainability (ecological, social, cultural, economic), connecting the small and local with the all-encompassing and global concerns. The book is for people who make homes in their personal or professional lives. It imagines an overarching paradigm of home making which starts from relationships. This is exemplified through speculative scenarios, a set of cruxes to be bounced into the planning process, methods for transdisciplinary co-creation and 29 recipes for home making, contributed by a wide range of stakeholders.

Key objectives for sustainability

The book Oikology – Home ecologics addresses sustainability in an uncompromisingly systemic way, synergistically bringing together environmental, economic, social and cultural dimensions of sustainability. The key sustainability objectives of the projects were to:

Meet the need of accessible housing for migrants, students, older persons (SDGs 10 and 11).
Practice participatory engagement in processes, actions and decisions targeting key contemporary and global challenges (SDGs 4 and 17).
Support community building, active citizenship and sharing of resources - addressing loneliness, social segregation and resource scarcity (SDGs 3, 10 and 12).

The project addresses these needs through the design of a planning resource, in the shape of a book, which targets decision makers in the housing sector, regional governance, as well as citizens directly.

The book provides conceptual frameworks, hands on examples, scenarios generated through co-creation, concrete guidelines in the form of recipes, and cruxes to use in the planning process, as well as methods for co-creation. Although the book is edited and consists of the chapters written by the main researchers, it also encompasses recipes authored by the co-creators – a diverse range of stakeholder. Oikology – Home Ecologics has therefore met the sustainability objectives through working collaboratively with relevant actors in processes of generating, analysing as well as sharing knowledge.

Key objectives for aesthetics and quality

The key objectives in terms of aesthetics and quality of experience of the project were to:

Make sustainability concerns accessible and relevant to multiple stakeholders and to create inclusive and meaningful spaces for imagining good lives together within Earth’s limits.
Decentralise and democratise solutions to sustainability challenges by focusing on relationships instead of, for example technology, and stimulating creativity in terms of situated, simple and low tech and inexpensive responses to needs.

We met these objectives through a co-creative process which enabled hands on engagement with complex concepts, such as climate change and human needs. The project used a broad range of artistic approaches and materialisations including cooking, mapping, drawing and prototyping with paper, threads, textiles, modelling clay, landscape, off-the-shelf household items. Importantly, because of the diverse range of participants, space was made for many kinds of languages to express oneself. Drawing on the field of metadesign, co-creation processes were facilitated to take participants on a trajectory from personal experiences, interests and needs, to shared concerns and endeavours, to the bigger global picture, and then back again to locate personal agency and action.

The artistic approaches and materialisations formed an integral part of the three-year long research and development process and in the dissemination of the project, including a hybrid of exhibition and performance tour, and the book itself. The aesthetics came out of the co-creation with the many stakeholders, thereby also breaking with more controlled and modernist design norms. The aesthetics embodies aspects of the mundane, easily accessible, layered and situated qualities of the project as a way of giving form to the key outcomes.

Key objectives for inclusion

The key objectives of this project in terms of inclusion were to:

Give visibility to the needs and dreams of migrants, students and older persons in housing decisions - groups unprioritized by the dominant housing sector.
Broaden the understanding of housing needs from the individual or household, to the community, and emphasising relationships.
Bring in more than human species’ needs into the consideration of sustainable housing.

We met these needs by in the co-creation, analysis and dissemination processes by catering to many cognitive styles and preferences, by, for example, working with verbal and visual languages, making, cooking, mapping outdoors. Throughout the project, we have stimulated engagement with complex relationships, between humans, humans and other species, and with the built environment. The framework of care from feminist technoscience (e.g. Puig dela Bellasa, 2017) and permaculture (e.g. Holmgren, 2002) was central in locating housing solutions in the remit of relationships instead of, for example, ‘solely’ the built environment. ‘Care’ decentralised sustainability to actions in the everyday by everyone, and helped home makers and planners to leave preunderstood categories, to imagine instead fluid continuums across care of Earth, care of people, care of self. In the book’s recipes – which includes contributions from students, migrants and older persons – ways of caring are illustrated in many ways. The book actively performs norm criticality by a situated discussion of, for example, the housing market, and by sharing a tool that the project has generated ‘secret housing’ for purposefully addressing potential exclusion and biases in collaboration.

Results in relation to category

The book Oikology – Home Ecologics is a multifaceted tool for systemic and holistic engagement with sustainability of the planning of housing and homes, for experts in the housing sector or governance, and for individual or communities of home makers. It consists of a wide range of methods for co-creation in this context. The tools (such as Scenario salad) are especially strong in terms of bringing stakeholders that are often silent or not represented into the planning process, such as migrants and more than human species. They are also strong in illuminating inconsistencies across legal and normative frameworks, and the goal conflicts between, for example, climate change and social segregation. Perhaps most importantly, the book as a whole, and the distinctive methods it shares, shifts the space of discussion from needs of market, to needs of people and planet, and reveals the emphasis on community both institutions and people want to see in housing strategies.

The approaches have been used, for example, in the context of conceptualising a municipality catering to multiple needs of food security, integration of new coming Swedes, which led to the identification of the centrality of food in social integration. (Food, 2018) Approaches were also used in the planning of a new transition village, which led to the identification of gaps between the local municipalities’ willingness to support, and the actual legal framework to do so. The tools have also been reiterated and used as references by design students in their independent projects, which is an effective way of impacting future design practices.

How Citizens benefit

The project took place in collaboration with citizens throughout. The target groups were migrants, students, older persons, as well as building sector, local and regional governance. We also included representatives from banks, small scale building cooperative, local farmers, migrant support networks, student support services and other relevant stakeholders

Co-creation took place through five generative and analytical steps:

Initial interviews with intermediaries to target groups to identify questions, and pilot relevant process.
Co-creation sessions in the form of workshops that travelled in a region, identifying needs and dreams of different audiences, and building models of shared visions for housing.
The material generated by citizens and other actors in housing development was then analysed and brought back to governance, industry stakeholders, citizen organisations in the form of scenarios, enabling concretisation in relation to legal frameworks, industrial processes, etc.
The researchers synthesised the material into an interactive exhibition and performance which toured the region, as well as visiting Stockholm Furniture Fair, enabling more stakeholders to respond to the material. The performance and exhibition were thereby both a transmission of findings and an opportunity for stakeholders to experience and generate more material.
The expanded material was presented in the book, into which a wide range of stakeholders were invited to make contributions to the book in the form of situated recipes for making homes with Earth’s limits.

Importantly, the work was situated in a region comprising rural to urban, as well as affluent to poorer areas and communities. The project covered all of these and made a particular effort to situate workshops and other activities for broadest possible access. This is also reflected in the diversity of approaches to housing and home making coming through the book.

Innovative character

This project is innovative in its persistent use of co-creative approaches, throughout the whole project period, including dissemination. This included bringing in a multitude of stakeholders, from governance, industry, as well as migrants, older persons and students. The co-creation also included researchers from other disciplines: business model innovation, technical prototyping of wood and glass.

The project is also innovative in its persistent combination of scientific and artistic ways of exploring and communicating housing within the limits of planet Earth, and the continuous movement between fact and speculation, towards creating new imaginaries of how we can live together within Earth’s limits as well as hands-on proposals.

It is also innovative in its uncompromisingly systemic approaches to ‘staying with the trouble’ (Haraway, 2016) of making good homes on Earth together, even when this creates friction with a dominant growth logic; and authentically understanding ecological, social, economic, cultural sustainability together (called for since WCED, 1987).

The visionary and open space for dialogue has been enabled by opening up for and inviting to spaces of friction between diverging world views, which includes vulnerability (for example when the researchers – who are not actors – performed scenarios developed in co-creation processes with their bodies), encouraging value explicitness, creating spaces for safe and brave discussions through the many tools for co-creation. In pursuit of challenging power biases in co-creative research and development, we also engaged international peers in a session of exploring and discussing power relations within and prompted by the project. (Ståhl et al. 2017)