| dc.description.abstract | This thesis surveys knowledges about sustainable dwelling in Oslo. Crises of homelessness, displacement, extermination, and extinction are unjustly affecting, hurting, and killing humans and non-humans all over this planet. Sustainability can mean many different things, but if sustainability is about covering the needs of all that lives today, tomorrow and in the futures further away – that calls for radical change. It can be challenging to imagine something radically different beyond dominant languages, ways of organising, or what is accepted truths or knowledge. With a long line of scholars suggesting looking towards social movements and grassroots in the search for different imaginations of sustainability and what is possible, I theorise squats and ‘Urban Ecological Pilot Projects’ (UEPPs) as spaces for different imaginaries and alternative visions, both as autonomous and institutionalised, both as material spaces and spaces of imagination. Squatters often contest how dwelling is organised and who gets to participate in shaping and changing cities. Today, there are more institutionalised squats, often named ‘Urban Ecological Pilot Projects’ (UEPPs), than not institutionalised squats in Oslo. I ask what alternative possibilities of sustainable dwelling derive from squatting in Oslo and how such knowledges align with or differ from dominant discourses about sustainable dwelling and change in Oslo. To explore this, I use feminist theory with its expertise in questioning hegemonies and its focus on the emotional, relational, care, and community. I show that the knowledges of squatters, x-squatters and UEPP residents differ from municipal knowledge about sustainable dwelling in recognising that to have time, communities, and spaces to dwell in other ways, one needs fundamental changes of language about sustainable dwelling, of who gets to participate, who is understood as resourceful actors in the city, of the organisation of housing, of the acknowledgement of care and community, and of what a good dwelling is. I suggest adding a feminist perspective to research of squatting. A feminist lens contributes to recognising that squatters and residents of institutionalised squat not only dwell within economic and technical specifications and architecture, but in groups, with histories, with their hands and imaginations who have been taught and inspired by others and with feelings of something being off. The participants of this thesis’ ways of knowing, and the spaces and situations they know in, stem from social movements, squatting, and counter cultures challenging dominant ways, and this cannot be created separated from them. | eng |