Dugnad Days: 
Oslo Architecture Triennale, Norway 2019

The renovation of a community house within the suburbs of Oslo. Designed and facilitated through dugnad (mutual support).

Dugnad has underpinned the culture of care and responsibility Norwegians have had as neighbours, national and global citizens for 800 years, which continues on the periphery in co-housing, civic and municipal collaborations and more. However, as the country becomes more individualistic, citizens are losing Dugnad’s value. Dugnad is also reflected across cultures globally in various placemaking strategies, including architecture dedicated to a more equitable society. Dugnad Days, a participatory design project selected for the Oslo Architecture Triennale 2019, creates a story of commitment, shared learning and collective responsibility. Dugnad Days explores collective, bespoke processes of building resilience and the social sustainability of communities through participatory placemaking. By recalibrating the Dugnad tradition of collective work and mutual support with the local community of Sletteløkka in Oslo, the project aimed to collectively plan, design and renovate a vacant building into a community center for the area. “Enough: the Architecture of Degrowth” – the Oslo Architecture Triennale 2019 is a call to arms to build alternatives to the unsustainable and unfair paradigm of growth, because human and ecological flourishing matter the most. Dugnad Days was exhibited in the Triennale’s exhibition, The Library, at the National Museum, Oslo, 26 Sept-24 Nov 2019.

Team: Alexander Eriksson Furunes, Mattias Josefsson,
Maria Årthun, Lucy Bullivant & Sudarshan Khadka
Partners: Bydel Bjerke & residents of Sletteløkka
Sponsor: KORO – Public Art Norway (Lokalsamfunnsordningen)