The creation of futures scenarios is a tool to addresschallenges towards sustainability in planning and thebuilt environment. Scenarios in the project BeyondGDP growth explore futures where priority is givento social and environmental aspects and economicgrowth is regarded as uncertain. When futures areused as an input to planning, there has to be anawareness of the possible consequences of those.Sustainability assessment for futures scenarios aimsto give a comprehensive assessment of how differentscenarios can affect relevant aspects. This thesis gives an overview of current methods forsustainability assessment of futures scenarios. It alsoproposes improvements to one of them and tests iton the Beyond GDP growth scenarios. SAFS (SustainabilityAssessment Framework for Scenarios) isthe method selected. SAFS considers environmentaland social aspects providing qualitative results anduses consumption perspective and life cycle approach. Improvements to SAFS are proposed in two directions.First, the Doughnut developed by Raworth(2012) is integrated in the method. It gives a graphicrepresentation, putting each aspect in context withthe others and facilitate the communication of theassessment results. Second, an alternative approachis suggested to evaluate the consequences of environmentaldeprivation on social conditions. Thisalternative approach can also help communicateuncertainties. / Att skapa framtidsscenarier är ett verktyg för attadressera utmaningar relaterade till hållbarhet inomsamhällsplanering och samhällsbyggnad. ProjektetBortom BNP-tillväxt utforskar i ett antal scenarierolika framtider där sociala och miljömässiga aspekterfår prioritet och ekonomisk tillväxt betraktas somosäker. När framtidsscenarier används som inputi samhällsplanering behöver det finnas en medvetenhetom dessa framtiders möjliga konsekvenser. Hållbarhetsbedömning av framtida scenarier utgören omfattande utvärdering av hur olika scenarier kanförväntas påverka relevanta aspekter. Den här uppsatsen ger en översikt över befintligametoder för hållbarhetsbedömning av framtidsscenarier,den applicerar en av dessa metoder - SAFS(Sustainability Assessment Framework for Scenarios) -på scenarierna inom Bortom BNP-tillväxt och föreslårförbättringar till metoden. SAFS väljs därför att densom metod tar hänsyn till såväl miljö- som socialaaspekter, ger kvalitativa resultat och utvärderar scenariernaur ett konsumtions- och livscykelperspektiv. Två förbättringar av SAFS föreslås. Den ena är attintegrera Raworths “Doughnut” (2012) eftersomden erbjuder ett sätt att grafiskt representera allautvärderade aspekter tillsammans och underlättaratt kommunicera resultatet från bedömningen. Denandra förbättringen innebär ett annat angreppssättför att utvärdera konsekvenserna av miljöförstöringför sociala aspekter. Det föreslagna angreppssättetkan även underlätta att kommunicera metodens inneboendeosäkerheter gällande resultaten. / Beyond GDP growth

For a more equal, just, and sustainable society to emerge, much of the human population will have to change some of its paradigms and consequently behaviour in one way or another.  While part of society will need to learn how to live without unsustainable conveniences and control unconscious consumption, others will need to adapt their capabilities to deal with the effects of climate change. The urgency of the current environmental and humanitarian crises combined are forcing society to explore alternative solutions to such problems.  Some post-development scholars and agencies are also looking at the role of grassroots movements, such as degrowth, self-sufficiency and permaculture, to replace obsolete practices. This research is based on these post-development thoughts which, among other things, argues that less consumption in the industrialised world, facilitated by grassroots local actions, and learning from the epistemology of the South, is more effective in addressing inequalities and contribute to beneficial change in the world than traditional practices. This thesis examined who is part of the ‘grow your own’ community, how it is practiced, motivations and the impact growing your own food can have.  It also attempted to analyse the promotion of ‘grow your own’ as a contributor to tackle the excessive consumerism of the more affluent as well as a contributor to improve food security for the more deprived, in both, the Global South and North. The main methodology used to collect primary quantitative and qualitative data was surveys.  The data was analysed via a mixed approach, mainly using descriptive statistics and content analysis. This study found that most growers were based in the UK and above 50 years old.  The most popular produce were fruits, herbs, and tomatoes.  The main motivations to grow were, to buy less from shops, save money and eat more seasonal, local and organic food.  The main practice dissemination was word of mouth with some use of social media.  This research found that a local authority intervention in providing free plants to community groups in Bristol had a huge impact and the scheme expanded 66% over three years.

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This thesis seeks to forge a conversation between two schools of contemporary political-economic thought - degrowth and modern monetary theory. With today's urgent, multiple, and interlinked socio-ecological crises, the degrowth school of thought has become increasingly relevant. While the degrowth movement has proposed a range of policies and visions for a post-capitalist future, the structural growth imperatives of capitalist states make degrowth visions politically and economically challenging to realize. Thus far, degrowth policies that aim to weaken society's growth imperative and start building a post-capitalist society have largely been raised from the assumption that governments are limited in budgetary terms, implicitly informed by the hegemonic neoclassical economics lens. However, modern monetary theory (MMT) has recently permeated the public debate, offering an alternative take on public spending, deficits, and the government’s fiscal policy space. MMT argues that monetary sovereign states are not fiscally constrained in the same way that households and non-sovereign entities are - instead, the actual limitations to spending are the resources available to a given nation. Yet, MMT theorists give insufficient attention to ecological considerations, exemplified by their tendency to take continued economic growth for granted and overlook ecological limits, particularly from a global justice perspective. Using an Ecological Political Economy lens, this thesis initiates a conversation between the degrowth and MMT scholarship, finding that while there are both distinct tensions between the two schools, there are also many synergies and possibilities for further cross-fertilization between them within the normative goal of socio-ecological sustainability and justice.

This is a project to design digital technologies to promote uses of public spaces challenging the social religion of productivism + consumerism. Instead I celebrate participative leisure, free time, political involvement and social relationships. Digital artefacts for what I'm calling the "unproductive city". The goal is to incorporate a different set of values where the “paid work” is not as relevant in our life as it is today.The project is focused on life in cities and works with the integration of computing technologies into everyday urban settings and lifestyles. What it is called “urban informatics”.Participative processes as well as user center design have guided the design. It comprehends different services and activities: A collaborative urban jukebox, exercises with locative media, participative design as a leisure activity, technological infrastructures for meetings and game design for public spacesThese activities are examples and explorations to find future challenges and different ways to design technologies for the unproductive city.

The project explores an alternative timekeeping device that without a digital screen and use of electrical light displays five distinct shades representing each stage of light a day consists of. The thesis presents a design proposal for an alternative watch that through unconventional methods uses natural light to gradually reveal the passage of time. Furthermore, design research includes observations of and interactions with other-than humans (such as the Calathea plant and a Spiral Grained Tree) and their relation to time and light. Underlying the two main themes is the topic of mental health and stress-related illness that has rapidly increased in Sweden over the past few years.

In response to growing critiques of the economic growth-centered model of development, post-growth approaches have been suggested as having potential to address various social-ecological crises. However, key uncertainties remain regarding the inner dynamics of such a society and the transition towards it; degrowth policy proposals often lack precision and depth, and do not sufficiently consider interactions. Yet policies do not exist in isolation, and their synergies, trade-offs, and unintended consequences need to be investigated. This study explores, through modelling, the potential of degrowth policies to achieve rapid reductions in environmental degradation whilst enabling high social wellbeing. Examples of policies that are explored in the model environment are production taxes on returns on capital, capital decommissioning, universal basic income, work time reduction, and maximum incomes. The research is grounded in a two-fold case study: Sweden as a high-income country where degrowth policies are appropriate, and the Integrated Sustainable Development Goals (iSDG) model as a system dynamics-based policy simulation tool designed to assess the impacts of various policy scenarios at a national scale. The results provide insights into the potential causal dynamics of these policies and show that they all cause trade-offs when implemented in isolation; they improve some social or ecological variables at the cost of others. However, when applied as a coherent package they appear effective in achieving social-ecological prosperity. In the model, combining a downscaling of production with reduced working hours and redistribution of wealth leads to rapid reductions in environmental pressures whilst eradicating poverty and reducing inequality and unemployment. Although there is a risk of misrepresenting degrowth policy dynamics because they are placed in a model context based on current economic structures, the results of this study highlight that some degrowth policies have the potential to succeed even if deeper structural changes have not yet taken place.

In light of the global climate crisis and the worldwide focus on ecological economy policies, this study aims to analyze what role the economy has in the quest for a sustainable future in Uppsala. How do urban planning documents as well as regional and municipality employees interpret and value economic sustainability in relation to ecological sustainability? The methodology includes two different types of document analysis as well as qualitative interviews. Finally, an ideal type analysis has been used to place the urban planning policies of Uppsala on a scale between ecological modernization theory and degrowth theory. The thesis shows a view of an economic sustainability in terms of economic growth as being the prerequisite for a sustainable development. Furthermore, the analysis shows an ambiguous portrayal of the relationship between the ecological and economic dimensions of sustainable development. The documents and employees depict the urban planning policies of Uppsala as being ecologically modernized. Despite relatively advanced climate policies, Uppsala has yet to articulate more bold views of a sustainable future.

Une opération économique, en fin de compte, repose sur une seule chose. Une chose des plus élémentaires qui soient, à savoir, tout simplement : l'emploi d'un objet. C'est bien là le socle de toute action économique. C'est-à-dire de toute action qui, à un moment donné, se veut utile ou rentable. Mais un tel acte a pour effet d'annuler toute la valeur que l'objet peut toujours présenter dans l'instant (comme son charme, sa drôlerie ou, encore, son étrangeté). Autrement dit, l'emploi d'un objet remplace toute la valeur sensible dudit objet par une valeur d'un autre ordre qui n'est autre que la valeur d'usage. Mais, le fait est qu'employer utilement quelque-chose n'a rien d'automatique. C'est qu'un tel acte revient très concrètement à s'opposer délibérément au cours habituel des choses qui, lui, consiste en une dépense inutile de chaque chose... Mais ce n'est pas tout car, au bout du compte, d'un point de vue général, l'action délibérée contre ce cours habituel des choses ne fait en réalité jamais que de l'accroître. Tout simplement parce qu'une telle action (n'étant donc pas automatique) se doit d'abord de dissiper pour son propre compte tout un tas de forces disponibles ; cela, avant même d'avoir pu commencer son œuvre. Tout ceci doit nous forcer à reconnaître que le véritable produit d'une opération économique n'est jamais qu'une meilleure dilapidation des richesses disponibles. Et c'est bien sous cet angle que sera envisagée, dans le cadre de ce travail, la notion de Décroissance. Cela grâce à la mise en perspective de la théorie d' « économie générale » de Georges Bataille avec les travaux de l'économiste Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen. / An economic operation relies, after all, upon one single thing. Upon one of the most elementary things, that is, simply: the use of an object. Such is the root of any economic act, i.e. of any act which, at some time, purports to be useful or profitable. But one effect entailed by such an act is to cancel all the value that such an object may instantaneoulsy present (such as its spell, drollery or, yet, its oddness). In other words, the use of an object implies that the sensitive value of that object be substituted by another sort of value, namely its use value. However, as a matter of fact, the useful employment of something is in no way automatic. Indeed, such a useful employment of things is actually equivalent to a deliberate opposition to the usual course of things, which consists, on the contrary, of a useless expenditure of all things... Still, from a general point of view, such a deliberate act against this usual course of things only achieves, after all, to always increase it. Just because such an act (thus, not being automatic), yet before it may have started to operate, first has to dissipate for itself a whole bunch of available forces. All of this leads us to acknowledge that the true product of an economic operation is always only a better squandering of the riches at disposal. It is according to this point of view that my research has focused on the notion of Degrowth, by combining Georges Bataille’s theory of “general economy” with economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s works.

Au début des années 2000, un mouvement de pensée politique se forme en France autour du terme « décroissance ». Il formule une critique radicale des sociétés contemporaines dont l’organisation ne tient pas compte des limites écologiques de la planète. L’une des réponses apportées est la relocalisation ; elle est étudiée en tant que dimension spatiale structurante de la décroissance. Cette thèse est fondée sur une enquête par immersion de longue durée dans le réseau français des militant-es politiques pour la décroissance, ainsi qu’une enquête de terrain plus courte à Montréal, associant observation directe et participante, entretiens et récolte documentaire. L’analyse montre d’abord le rapport entre les ressources et dispositions des militant-es et les modes de structuration et de fonctionnement des organisations politiques visant l’échelle nationale. Elle distingue ensuite une pluralité de modes d’actions défiant les frontières établies entre champ intellectuel, champ politique, mouvements contestataires et alternatives locales. L’étude de séquences de mobilisations montre l’ancrage des militant-es dans la gauche de (la) gauche écologiste tandis que l’analyse de trajectoires d’engagement dévoile la valorisation des alternatives concrètes dans le répertoire d’actions collectives des militant-es pour la décroissance. La multipositionnalité apparaît alors comme un moyen de garantir la reconnaissance militante et l’engagement local comme une condition de la mise en cohérence de soi. La relocalisation, mise en jeu dans le répertoire contestataire des militant-es, est finalement présentée comme la (re)construction collective d’espaces de vie appropriés, point de départ de la transformation sociale souhaitée / An activist movement around the political concept ‘degrowth’ originated in France in the early 2000s. It formulates a radical critique of unsustainable contemporary development patterns and ways of life. ‘Relocalization’, which the movement puts forward as an alternative, is analyzed as degrowth’s fundamental spatial dimension. This thesis uses data gathered through multi-sited ethnography in the French degrowth political network and a political organization in Montreal, including participant observation and interviews. The analysis begins by showing a relationship between activists’ critical dispositions and national political organizations’ modes of structuration and functioning. Furthermore, it identifies several modes of action that blur the distinctions between intellectual and political fields, social movements and local alternatives. The analysis of mobilization sequences shows activists’ affiliation to the ecological and radical left. Their careers reveal how concrete alternatives are valued within degrowth militants’ collective action repertoires. Maintaining multiple commitments becomes a way of guaranteeing activist recognition and local activism a condition of individual coherence. Within the action repertoires, relocalization emerges as the collective (re)construction of appropriated living spaces, a starting point for the social change wished