About the Festival
Degrowth Festival was created from a simple conviction: new ways of thinking emerge when people meet. Ideas become tangible through conversations, shared experiences, collective reflection, and experimentation. The festival therefore functions as a temporary space where citizens, researchers, artists, activists, and practitioners can come together to explore how we might organize our lives, communities, and institutions differently.
Rather than presenting fixed answers, the festival invites participants into processes of inquiry and co-creation. Through talks, workshops, artistic interventions, communal meals, and informal encounters, we investigate how degrowth perspectives reshape our understanding of everyday life, economic systems, social relations, and collective futures.
Each edition is organized around themes that respond to the questions that feel most urgent in the present moment. The programme combines critical perspectives with embodied and sensory experiences, creating opportunities to engage intellectually, emotionally, and collectively.
Hosted at Kulturhuset Islands Brygge, the festival brings together diverse forms of knowledge and practice. Academic research meets artistic exploration, lived experience meets political imagination, and speculative visions meet concrete experiments already unfolding in the world around us.

Degrowth Festival 2023: Deep Roots, Utopia & Economy

The first Degrowth Festival in Copenhagen explored two interconnected themes: ecological economy and utopian futures. Through talks, workshops, communal meals, and artistic interventions, participants were invited to rethink the economic and social structures shaping everyday life.

The festival opened with introductions to degrowth perspectives on capitalism, ecological limits, and alternative economic systems, including contributions from Degrowth Copenhagen and Professor Alf Hornborg. Participants engaged with questions of appropriation, value, and the hidden assumptions underlying economic growth.

The second day focused on utopia, care, and collective imagination. Drawing on contributions from Rebecca Rutt, Ekaterina Chertkovskaya, and Vasna Ramasar, the programme explored care, decoloniality, and the role of imagination in societal transformation. Through sensory and participatory workshops, participants were invited to reflect on how we might navigate ecological crisis together and cultivate more caring, regenerative ways of living.

Throughout the festival, art, conversation, and collective practice created a space for imagining futures beyond growth and experimenting with new forms of community and solidarity.

Degrowth Festival 2024 – on solidarity, society and sprouting futures
The festival was about community, solidarity, and sprouting futures. Themes focusing on strategies for hope will was presented through workshops and panels where conversations between Fernando Racimo and Ekaterina Chertkovskaya about strategies and between Laura Horn and Vasna Ramasar about community and the surrounding structures. The festival bloomed with  material, practical, theoretical and sensoric workshops and art. With art installations of mycelium sculptures and latex/weed flags, restorative performance by SHADOW GLEANERS and rebellious performance by Tanya Montan Rydell. Through workshops revolved around solidarity and visionary restructuring. And as always the communal dining and sensory artistic expressions was key to stimulate interconnectedness and challenge our habitual thinking.

Degrowth Festival 2025 – Courage, Justice and Collective Transformation

In 2025, the Degrowth Festival in Copenhagen returned for its third consecutive year, bringing together citizens, researchers, artists, activists, and community organisers to explore pathways towards social and ecological transformation.

Under the theme of courage, the festival focused on the structural crises of our time: climate breakdown, biodiversity collapse, rising inequality, colonial continuities, democratic decline, and the economic systems driving them. Rather than treating these as isolated problems, the festival approached them as interconnected consequences of extractive and growth-oriented structures. This was approached through a

A conversation between Matthias Schmelzer and Nick Fizpatrick about Degrowth as a conflict position, moderated Agnete Vienberg Hansen. And two talks Degrowth is Political: Palestine, empire, and building a world of care – Talk by Sara Al-Mahdi (Degrowth researcher and political ecologist) and Connecting the Dots, Genocide and Climate Crisis. - Collective Against Environmental Racism.

Through talks, workshops, artistic interventions, communal meals, and collective conversations, participants explored questions of just transition, global solidarity, decolonial perspectives, and the need for forms of delinking from destructive economic dependencies. The programme examined how communities can reclaim agency and build alternatives rooted in care, commons, reciprocity, and ecological regeneration.

Particular attention was given to the relationship between local action and global justice: how a transition away from growth-based economies in the Global North must be accompanied by reparative and decolonial approaches that challenge unequal exchange, resource extraction, and the externalisation of environmental and social costs.

Held in both Danish and English, the festival created a temporary space for critical reflection, collective learning, and practical imagination. Participants were invited not only to analyse the systems that shape our world, but also to explore the emerging practices, alliances, and forms of organisation that point towards more democratic, regenerative, and caring futures.

Degrowth Festival #4 2026
Transtopias – From Utopia to Everyday Life

19-20. September at Kulturhuset Islands Brygge

In 2026, Degrowth Festival returns for its fourth consecutive year with talks, workshops, communal meals, and art; because it still feels—and more urgently than ever—necessary to gather citizens, researchers, artists, and activists to explore new pathways for societal transformation.

This year, we focus on transformation itself and on the alternative processes already emerging in the cracks of the current system.

Degrowth Festival is designed as a participatory, interdisciplinary, and sensory commons: a temporary pocket in the city where theory, practice, art, and activism are woven together. The programme is built as a coherent whole with introductory talks, conversations, parallel workshops, artistic interventions, and shared meals that support immersion and encounters across differences.

The survival wing and the collapse wing – why degrowth transtopia now?

We live in a time where narratives of collapse and strategies of survival exist side by side. Climate breakdown, biodiversity crisis, social inequality, and democratic decline define our present—but they also open an urgent question: What kind of world are we actually trying to save? And what kind of world do we want to build?

A utopia is a perfected dream version of our existing world. A transtopia, by contrast, contains things not yet in existence and, as the word suggests, transcends our current reality. As Gibson-Graham so precisely describe, economies—and lives—outside the profit-driven financial market already exist here and now, and we all participate in them, but we do not recognize them as economy and therefore fail to see them. How do we learn to notice them more clearly? How do we zoom in on the possible solutions already crawling in the cracks?

Saturday will feature the recurring introduction to Degrowth, after which we move into reflections on what transformation actually means. We will open three portals in which guests and specialists together confront the challenges within construction, ecological foundations, and food systems.

Sunday, we will “Degrowth” democracy—and for that reason we have invited Folkets Ting to help us find ways to take democracy back.

Day 1. Sept. 19: From Utopia to Everyday Life

Should we rebuild instead of building new? Develop construction materials from mycelium and seaweed? Make permacultural food forests part of the school curriculum? Cultivate local democracy through citizens’ assemblies that actually drive development? Transform the housing market into public, municipally owned housing for all? Retrain and support farmers in the transition to regenerative agriculture so that nature and biodiversity can recover?

These questions are no longer hypothetical. In many places, people are already taking action. Degrowth Festival 2026 brings together those who are already doing it with those who want to join.

The festival’s first day is dedicated to sketching probable futures through encounters with concrete initiatives, communities, and practices working on transformation within construction, food, economy, care, organizing, and democracy. Through talks, conversations, and collective workshops, we place the actual problems side by side with the solutions that already exist—and investigate what they require from us.

What do we need to renounce? What do we wish to achieve? What can we beneficially let go of in our current societal form? And which other ways of organizing communities—without hierarchical and oppressive structures and without consuming the resources of the future—are already beginning to take shape?

Day 2. Sept. 20: Folkets Ting – Democracy from the roots

The festival’s second day is dedicated to the development of new democratic root systems orchestrated by by Folkets Ting.

“They say the climate protest is dead—we say the people’s power is alive.”

At a time when political decisions are made behind closed doors, and trust in existing institutions is in free fall, we insist that democracy belongs to all of us. Politicians have broken the contract with society while the oceans die, inequality grows, action is absent, and we continue consuming the resources of other countries and of the future.

Folkets Ting is an experiment in direct, bottom-up democracy. Through public assemblies, participants work collectively to decide which struggles we must carry forward together, and how we can develop democratic structures that are actually capable of carrying the transition locally.
Here, participants are not an audience, but active co-creators of analyses, decisions, and future actions.