The project process per case, and how it feeds into the common, cross-case deliverables.

The Culture Based Solutions (CbS) project runs for four years from December 2025 until the third quarter of 2028, across four case sites in Norway. At Losæter, the work unfolds in two main phases, with a KulturverkSted workshop opening and closing the research process. CbS will primarily be working with Losæter from the beginning of the growing season in 2026 until the end of the season in 2027.

Throughout, the project carries two connected ambitions for the Losæter work package: to understand what Losæter needs to continue to thrive and reach its full potential, and to explore what it would take for there to be more places like it. Both ambitions feed into a larger goal that runs across all four cases: to shift the conversation among decision-makers, developers, and others with influence over landscapes under pressure, so that cultural practices and traditions are genuinely considered as part of the toolkit of solutions available to them, not as a footnote to conventional approaches.

The first KulturverkSted

The opening workshop in early summer 2026 brings together the people most closely connected to Losæter: practitioners, collaborators, and community members who know the site well. Together we scope the focus of the project, share stories, and begin building a picture of what Losæter does, what pressures it faces, and what it could become. This is not a consultation. It is the starting point of a collaboration, and what emerges from it will shape what we investigate and plan over the following two years months.

The first KulturverkSted is the most important moment for setting the initial focus areas for the project case and the activities that will be planned. The direction will continue to be refined through dialogue with the community throughout the process.

The session combines three methodological approaches. Systems Oriented Design tools help us map and make sense of the complexity of the site and its relationships. The community climate facilitation approach developed by Village Green (Mathew Stiller-Reeve) creates conditions for open, productive dialogue across different perspectives. Arts-based methods, brought by Eamon O’Kane, Professor of Visual Art at KMD, University of Bergen, open different ways of knowing and expressing what is often invisible or hard to put into words. Together, these three approaches allow participants to engage with the same questions from different angles, and to surface insights that more conventional research methods tend to miss.

The workshop includes making and eating food together.

Between the workshops

After the first KulturverkSted, from 2026 to late 2027, the research and project activities deepen across two growing seasons. What this looks like in practice will be shaped significantly by what emerges from that first workshop. The following gives a flavour of the kinds of activities that could be part of this phase: participant observation, walking interviews, and open-ended conversations at Losæter across its growing seasons; attending farming activities, community meals, and collective workdays; expert interviews with people working in urban farming across Oslo and Norway. But these are illustrative, not fixed. The work could take many forms beyond data collection and observation, including exhibitions, events, provocations, and other activities that are of genuine value to Losæter and its community, not just to the research.

Throughout, the Systems Oriented Design unit at AHO maintains a conceptual scaffolding that connects findings from Losæter with insights emerging from the three other case studies, building a shared picture of what culture-based solutions look like in practice across very different landscapes.

In autumn 2026, AHO master’s students join the project as co-researchers. They produce gigamaps, system layer maps, and intervention sketches grounded in the Losæter case, contributing a further layer of analysis and imagination to the work.

Running through all of this is a dedicated line of inquiry shared across all four case sites: understanding the role of municipal and other decision-makers in relation to the dual ambitions of each case. What structures, mechanisms, and resources do they have at their disposal to support initiatives like Losæter? What would need to change for cultural practices and traditions to be genuinely considered as part of their toolkit? This work will involve dedicated activities at Losæter and across the other cases, and feeds directly into the Intervention Guide as one of the primary threads of the cross-case synthesis.

The second KulturverkSted

The closing workshop in late 2027 or early 2028 brings participants back together to reflect on what the research has found, and to help define what culture-based solutions actually means in practice. By this point, the project will have generated a body of maps, stories, images, and observations from all four case sites. These become the material for collective sense-making, and the basis for the project’s outputs.

What we will produce together

The work at Losæter has its own set of deliverables, which feed into outputs shared across all four cases. Both are described below as a starting point for conversation. What we actually focus on, who we try to reach, and what form the outputs take will be shaped through dialogue with stakeholders at the first KulturverkSted, and refined throughout the collaborative research process as understanding deepens.

Losæter case deliverables

A published article with Losæter as the central case. Initial ideas for its focus include the role of multifunctional urban farms in addressing social and ecological pressures in the city, how art builds and sustains places like this, and how the balance between order and chaos keeps them alive. The actual focus will emerge from the process itself.

These findings, along with written text and media materials produced throughout the engagement, feed directly into two contributions to the cross-case outputs: text and media for the Atlas, and contributions for the Intervention Guide.

Cross-case deliverables

These outputs bring together findings from all four cases into a single body of work aimed at shifting how cultural practices and traditions are understood and valued by decision-makers, developers, and others with influence over landscapes under pressure.

The Atlas is an art-map publication drawing on mapping activities from all four KulturverkSteds. It will contain maps of past and future place names, place-based assets, and visual material from the workshops, edited and published through KMD at UiB, and exhibited at museums, libraries, and schools.

The Intervention Guide is the project’s primary tool for influencing decision-makers. Its focus, content, and target audiences will be determined through dialogue with stakeholders across all four cases. The ambition is not simply to communicate research findings clearly, but to make a genuine case for cultural practices and traditions as solutions that belong in the toolkit of anyone responsible for landscapes under pressure.

An academic paper that develops the concept of culture-based solutions as a research framework, contributing to international debates on climate adaptation and nature-based solutions.

Throughout the process it may emerge that another or other deliverables are desirable. They are also open to be shaped according to what emerges as most valuable for the project ambitions.

A final gathering

The project closes with a public event bringing together participants, findings, and outputs from all four case sites. The format and location are still being decided, and that openness is intentional. The event will be designed to serve the project’s original ambition as much as its research conclusions, creating something of genuine value for the communities and practitioners who have contributed to it throughout. The work from Losæter will feature as part of that wider picture