| dc.description.abstract | This thesis will take the cemetery as an object of research in order to shed light on how urban planning discursively contributes to construct and order the city, the assumptions urban planning operates within, and the implications this has for the conditions of existence for the cemetery as an urban space, for urban planning and for the city as a whole. In both urban planning policy and research, there is a growing interest in urban cemeteries and their role as public green spaces. In an increasingly densifying city, the cemeteries in Oslo are thought to hold important qualities that could be developed to meet the needs of the city in the future. This concerns both climate change mitigation, population increase and changing cultural practices. The cemeteries are traced out to be able to be special, multifunctional green spaces that holds both green, cultural and historical values, and play an important part in the development of a more sustainable and livable city. Despite the value and quality of this research, their approach to cemeteries as urban spaces has tended to take several assumptions about the city for granted. In contrast, by situating the proposed changes to the cemetery within its socio-political context, this thesis is an effort to provide a critical reading of the values that shape the current strategic planning of cemeteries in Oslo, and the implications of these. The theoretical framework applied is a synthesis of literature on deathscapes, cultural political economy, the production of space, and the concept heterotopia. Heteroropias are discursive and physical Other spaces, both mirroring the current processes of ordering in society, and offering alternative modes of ordering. Cemeteries understood as heterotopias holds a critical imaginative potential by resisting to be known fully and revealing to us the non-necessity of our common-sense knowledge of the world. Through a discursive analysis of current policy proposals on the development of cemeteries in Oslo, supplemented by interviews with bureaucrats and planning officials, this thesis finds that the discourse on cemeteries as urban green spaces can be understood as an effort to resolve the ‘under-use’ of urban space. Instead of protecting the cemetery from the increased density and accelerating activity within the urban environment, the cemetery is supposed to no longer be pushed aside, but rather be understood as a part of the city and to be integrated into the urban networks of activity and accumulation. The language within this discourse of allowing for more, smarter, and more efficient management and use of the cemetery space is thus not effectively challenging the problems of densification, but rather tries to shape a heterotopic space – a space disrupting the natural order of things - into a solution to the many problems of an increasingly commodified city. In addition, the discourse on cemeteries as green urban spaces is in effect trying to make legible and rearticulate the disruptive qualities of the presence of death within the cemetery, by ascribing it certain qualities valued by the urban planning discourse and the economic imaginary it is marked by. By doing so, the imaginative capacity within these spaces as heterotopias are defused, and a specific understanding of urban space, what problems it faces, and how to solve these problems within the logics of a capitalist economic imaginary, is naturalized. | eng |