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Paper short abstract

This paper discusses visions of environmental futures and unexpected human, technological and multispecies alliances in the San Francisco Bay Area. While imagining the future is often seen as daunting amid inequality and climate risks, we show polarizations and commonalities in these scenarios.

Paper long abstract

The San Francisco Bay Area is often viewed as the cradle of two opposing futures: influential tech industry visions, on the one hand, and movements and scholars advancing social and environmental justice, on the other. Based on fieldwork conducted between 2024 and 2025 with highly diverse research participants, this paper shows that these discourses resonate to some extent with everyday practices of futuring but also strongly deviate. In a context marked by high inequality and climate change-related risks, such as wildfires and rising sea levels, thinking about the long-term future is often seen as challenging, irrelevant, or problematic; yet people still devise scenarios.

First, from a methodological point of view, we will discuss discrepancies in futuring based on research with individuals with starkly different resources and futuring practices, involving different objects, contexts, generational, and more-than-human thinking. Second, we present scenarios that emerged from interviews despite initial scepticism concerning futuring. These environmental scenarios are often socially polarized, with strong utopian or dystopian tendencies (tech oligarchy vs. grassroots democracy, humans vs. nature, rich vs. poor, etc.); depending on the subject and scale, but they also reveal unexpected commonalities regarding anticipated fault lines and shared concerns. Understanding polarization through the lens of anticipation allows us not only to grasp possible outlooks but also to explore the commonalities and possibilities of unexpected human, technological, and multispecies alliances, which are considered key to how futures come into being.