PUBLICATION / 194 PAGES / 2017 / DONBAS

The Degrowth Manual is conceived as a “firecracker publication” - a spark for dialogue among residents of shrinking cities for post-growth urban futures. Structured as a bilingual (Russian and English), self-guided and self-contained horizontal workshop, it can be undertaken individually or collectively. As an open-source document, it is easily downloadable, printable, and adaptable.The manual is also metamorphosical in nature - transformative and iterative. 

Each edition evolves based on feedback from previous uses, allowing it to respond organically to the needs and realities of its participants. Rather than analyzing the city through the detached lens of planning - as most territorial decisions tend to do - it invites more human-centric methods of reading urban space: through memory, social media, time capsules, and alternative cartographies. 

As one of the core tools of The Degrowth Institute, the manual facilitates context-specific discussions, equipping residents with new ways of perceiving their own cities. It opens space to reflect on ongoing urban processes, while fostering collective imaginaries that resist the dominant capitalist narrative of growth and accumulation. Manuals completed during workshop sessions are added to the Degrowth Institute Library - an evolving archive of intangible stories and potential tangible strategies from places shaped by demographic and economic decline. It is a collective project, rooted in the belief that a city’s future does not have to grow to thrive.

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GAME / 39 CARDS / 2017 / DONBAS

Part of the Degrowth Manual, The Degrowth Tarot is a deck of specially designed cut-out cards that invites users to fortune-tell alternative urban futures - encouraging a break from the entrenched logics of growth. Through play and improvisation, the cards generate new forms of collective imagination and knowledge production.

Building on the first two chapters of the manual, which explore cognitive cartography and shared memory, the tarot becomes a tool for opening up future scenarios. As a form of speculative forecasting, it embraces intentional loss of control - inviting the unexpected as a generative force in envisioning what comes next.

The game functions as a creative catalyst at a time when the paradigms, habits, and instruments of growth-driven urbanism are increasingly obsolete. Rather than offering solutions, it provides a framework to think otherwise - to destabilize, question, and reassemble.The deck is composed of various symbolic categories: phoenix, washing machine, community, DNA, ruin, future, rituals, life, as well as a series of shortcut keys: ctrl+c, ctrl+n, ctrl+v, ctrl+s, ctrl+x, ctrl+o. The final six cards are intentionally left blank, inviting participants to create their own symbols - proposing new themes, desires, or concerns that reflect the futures they wish to invoke.

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INSTALLATION / 350 SQM / 2019 / DUBAI

Photos: Ismail Noor

Commissioned by Alserkal Arts Foundation, this public art project transformed the former Nadi Al Quoz building into a contemporary ruin folly - drawing from the 18th and 19th century Western garden tradition, where patrons constructed ‘deliberate ruins’ and ‘exotic pavilions’ to punctuate their estates. These follies - forms of unusable architecture - stood as spatial counter-narratives to the utilitarian logic of the then-emerging industrial age.

By creating a ruin in 21st-century Dubai, the work reflects on the extractive nature of contemporary city-building and recontextualizes it within overlapping timelines - human, geological, and architectural. The wetlands from the last Ice Age, the omnipresent desert, and the remnants of a former marble factory from the 20th Century converge here as sedimented histories, layered into the site.

In an attempt to return the building’s materials to their ‘original state’, elements were repurposed, repositioned, and partially dismantled. The process became a form of speculative excavation - part construction, part undoing.

The project proposes architecture as an ongoing process, rather than a fixed object. It explores cycles of ruinification, ecological footprint, and material returns. In doing so, it gestures toward alternative urban models - ones that embrace impermanence, care, and the radical potential of unbuilding.

PERFORMATIVE WALK & TAPESTRY / 730 A4 PAGES  / 2019 / DUBAI

An excursion and discursive dinner through the vacant office towers of Dubai. With 41% of grade B and C office units unoccupied in 2019 - a number projected to rise - districts like Jumeirah Lakes Towers and Al Barsha have become silent archives of paused ambition. But rather than framing these vacancies as failures or voids to be corrected, this project approaches them as critical spaces - sites that allow us to question, and potentially subvert, the dominant logic of growth. These empty offices are not empty. They are charged with residue - of presence, of labor, of possibility.

The guided walk through one of these towers offered rare access to something omnipresent yet largely invisible: vacancy. Traces of former life remain - abandoned retail units, a shuttered fitness club, a restaurant whose scent still lingers. These are not shells, but ecosystems, layered with memory. Preserving their ghostly complexity is a form of heritage-making.In the unfinished upper floors, the walls bear silent testimony: chalk sketches, names, poems, and symbols left by guards, cleaners, architects, engineers, masons. Towers drawn by those who built them. Fish. Pigeons. Signs of care, boredom, belonging.

These markings were gathered and transformed into a paper tapestry - a visual terrain of gestures that served as the backdrop for a shared pizza dinner held in one of the vacant office units. A moment of communion, surrounded by the past lives of a space that insists on being seen, not for what it might become, but for what it already holds.

VIDEO / 8'20" / 2015 / MARIUPOL

Conceived and developed in Mariupol, a city in the Donbas region of Donetsk, in Eastern Ukraine, this project takes the form of a manifesto for the city’s future urban development. The performance captured in the video acted as both research method and discursive tool - a catalyst for imagining alternative urban futures.While global urban populations continue to rise, the phenomenon of shrinking cities has become increasingly widespread. 

Mariupol, whose economy remains tied to a heavily industrial sector now subject to automation, is emblematic of this condition. Around the world, cities facing similar challenges have adopted policies such as “smart decline” and “strategic shrinkage.” Yet these terms often mask latent ambitions for growth, rather than genuinely confronting the implications of contraction.

Our inquiry centered on subverting conventional understandings of urban growth - particularly as they relate to master planning. What if shrinkage were embraced, not resisted? What does it mean to plan for reduction rather than expansion?We propose a shift in urban paradigms: one in which cities acknowledge their shrinking trajectories and actively plan within that reality. Rather than viewing decline as a failure, this opens up new spatial and political possibilities - opportunities to experiment with participatory decision - making and collective visioning for a more intentional, downsized built environment.

VIDEO