| dc.description.abstract | What does it mean for a city to progress? What does growth entail for those who wish to make the city a healthy, sustainable, and good place to live? This thesis is based on six-month ethnographic fieldwork in Liverpool, England, conducted in the spring of 2019. My aim is to give an understanding of how futures are imagined within the context of a changing urban environment. I look at how a grassroot community of social entrepreneurs, artists and creatives who have made a home in industrial ruins rub up against private development companies who see possibilities in the same urban landscape. Future-making projects may seem overlapping yet at the same time causes friction. For behind a shared rhetoric of growth drawing on values like community, sustainability, cultural expression, wellbeing and social cohesion, lie contradictions and diversity. The activities in the grassroot projects demonstrate their visions of what a good life in a city entail through moving bodies, sensing, playing, and building networks. I argue that through these activities, the grassroot engages in a politics of the subject that has the potential to create new identities and modes of being in the world that potentially challenge capitalisms ontological status as the only way for humans to inhabit the earth and society to be constructed. | nob |