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Short abstract

This paper examines how creative participatory futuring methods can surface social values to inform inclusive, climate-resilient floating urban development. Drawing on three workshops, it shows how co-creation, (deep) mapping and serious gaming generate design-relevant insights for upscaling.

Long abstract

Abstract for academic paper presentation: Future cities require new urban development models capable of addressing climate risks, urbanisation pressures, and global sustainability goals. Floating urban developments are increasingly discussed as potentially climate-adaptive solutions for at-risk cities. However, developing and upscaling floating urban developments involves complex societal and environmental challenges that call for participatory and anticipatory approaches travelling between actors and scales, in order to achieve sustainable and socially grounded solutions for and pathways towards the future. Creative methods provide an opportunity to enhance the acceptability and inclusiveness of new floating urban developments by incorporating social values of potential future residents and stakeholders, illuminating what they desire, appreciate and prioritize. Therefore, our study explored such values, building on a series of three workshops conducted in Amsterdam, and involving professionals, current residents, and potential future residents. Through creative methods including the co-creation of scenarios, (deep) mapping and serious gaming, the workshops explored underlying social values of participants and their implications for future floating neighborhood design. The findings indicate that such creatively designed participatory approaches can result in design-relevant knowledge, supporting more inclusive and societally accepted floating urban developments. The paper also provides a methodological reflection on how participatory futuring practices can surface assumptions, expectations, and values to inform urban design and policymaking supporting resilient urban futures.

Keywords: Floating urban developments; urban climate resilience; participatory design; futuring; upscaling

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Short abstract

This contribution explores the potential and pitfalls of AI images as an anticipatory and speculative method for urban transition, examining how image-generative AI intervenes in material urban processes and asking how these tools can offer a democratic infrastructure for shaping urban futures.

Long abstract

AI-driven image generation offers a new and tempting anticipatory method for envisioning urban futures, providing seemingly perfect, friction-free visions of sustainable cities while ignoring uncertainty and complexity. In my contribution, I will discuss the potential and pitfalls of AI images as anticipatory and speculative method for urban transition, examining how image-generative AI intervenes in material urban processes. Based on preliminary fieldwork, I analyze three domains of use: (1) professional practices among architects and urban designers, particularly in scenario planning and speculative design (e.g., Zaha Hadid); (2) non-professional applications in participatory visioning (e.g., UrbanistAI / Kiezlabor Berlin); and (3) political uses in foresight (e.g., Jared Kushner on Gaza City). While the widespread adoption highlights the coercive power of images and the influence of generative AI, it also raises critical concerns: energy consumption, right-wing aesthetics, western-centrism, copyright, or big-tech monopolization, to name just a few.

Ultimately, the question is how AI images can help imagine a future worth living in and creating. Drawing on Comi and Whyte’s (2018) framework, I investigate whether AI-generated images can serve as epistemic artifacts for learning and transformation—rather than instrumental tools or teleological ends. Applying an STS perspective, I examine the assumptions users bring to these tools and those inscribed in their technological structure. The central question I aim to address remains: whose hopes and vulnerabilities are accounted for when envisioning urban futures through AI—and how can we ensure these tools, within their structural constraints, contribute to a fair and democratic infrastructure for shaping material urban processes?

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Short abstract

This paper presents a method of “second-order learning conversations” that embeds structured reflection in Positive Energy Districts (PEDs), surfacing hidden assumptions and trade-offs to support more just and sustainable urban energy futures.

Long abstract

Cities, and Positive Energy Districts (PEDs) in particular, are key arenas for developing radical urban visions for the future. PEDs are still in their formative stages, and existing projects reveal significant differences in their conceptualisation, governance and implementation. While much of the existing work has focused on technical and economic transition pathways, the unintended social and ecological side effects of the intended structural innovations, as well as the normative visions they embody, have received little attention. This paper presents a method for structured reflection that positions second-order learning as a precondition for just and sustainable urban energy futures. Drawing on constructive technology assessment and the notion of 'moments of reflection', the paper sets out and demonstrates the use of second-order learning conversations as a practical framework for identifying and challenging assumptions, problem framings and value priorities that are often taken for granted in PED development. The method was tested in five PEDs in Austria, Belgium and Sweden, involving planners, utility companies, researchers, municipal officials and local stakeholders. We demonstrate how the method can reveal conflicting visions of PEDs, highlight trade-offs and open up alternative pathways that might otherwise remain invisible in routine project management. In doing so, the method encourages participants to re-examine design choices, governance arrangements, and indicators of success, thereby embedding reflexivity in ongoing and future PED processes. We argue that institutionalising such second-order learning practices is crucial for shaping urban energy transformations that are technically, economically, socially and ecologically robust and sustainable.

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Short abstract

Tools that foster imagination, empathy, and systemic insight are needed to cope with today's many pressing problems. We designed Futures Literacy Laboratories in four countries as experiments to nurture imagination and transformative learning related to repair, sharing and reuse in urban areas.

Long abstract

In a world with numerous problems, we must question business-as-usual approaches to plan and prepare for the future. Instead, tools that foster imagination, empathy, and systemic insight are urgently needed. As part of this, futures literacy may be one crucial skill (Miller, 2018; Larsen et al., 2019). Such literacy puts the human imagination at the core; the capacity to know how to imagine the future, and why it is necessary. This is a learning process closely connected to double-loop learning (Argyris and Schön, 1997) and transformative learning (Mezirow, 1997; Klein, 2022) which has become one of the most prominent learning theories for explaining and accompanying learning processes related to sustainability transformations (Singer-Brodowski, 2023; Grund et al., 2024).

In this paper, we experiment with Futures Literacy Laboratories in four European cities (Oslo, Poznan, Riga and Copenhagen) on the topic of repair, sharing and reuse of four material streams - building materials, furniture, food and electronics. Such laboratories provide an inclusive and creative method of future exploration, designed to create a kind of “everything could have been otherwise” mentality. They aim to challenge participants’ habitual thinking and create awareness that what we do today is largely shaped by our expectations for the future. We demonstrate how various urban stakeholders in the four countries envision the future of reuse, sharing and repair societies, and what we may learn from such laboratory learning “experiments”.

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Long abstract

In times of increasing geopolitical uncertainty and accelerating technological change, the ability of organizations to anticipate and shape possible futures has become a critical strategic capability. Foresight and Future Literacy are therefore increasingly recognized as key competencies that enable organizations to navigate uncertainty and shape innovation. However, despite their strategic relevance, anticipatory capabilities often remain marginal within corporate decision-making processes.

A central reason lies in the structural logic of organizations. Corporate governance and performance management systems are typically driven by short-term key performance indicators (KPIs) and measurable outputs. As a result, long-term anticipatory capabilities frequently struggle to gain legitimacy within existing organizational evaluation frameworks. This creates a paradox: while foresight is essential for innovation and future-oriented transformation, its institutionalization often conflicts with prevailing managerial logics.

This study addresses this tension by introducing the concept of a Future Literacy Index, designed to make anticipatory capabilities measurable within existing organizational performance logics. Based on established foresight frameworks and practical experience in foresight training, a preliminary Future Literacy Test was developed and piloted. By translating futures-oriented competencies into an evaluative format, the approach seeks to bridge the gap between anticipatory thinking and short-term organizational performance metrics.

Keywords: Future Literacy; Foresight: Anticipatory Capabilities; Organizational Decision-Making

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Short abstract

This paper examines two design fiction workshops with scientists from the French Subsurface: a Common Good programme exploring desirable futures for the Parisian underground. It shows how speculative design can pluralize sociotechnical imaginaries and open debate on urban subsurface futures.

Long abstract

Urban undergrounds are increasingly framed as strategic infrastructures for energy transition, transport and resource management. In this context, the future of the subsurface is often defined through technical modelling, engineering expertise and infrastructural planning. Such approaches tend to stabilize a dominant sociotechnical imaginary (Jasanoff and Kim, 2015) of the subsurface as a resource for circulation, storage and extraction.

This paper explores how speculative design methods can help reopen these imaginaries (Dunne and Raby, 2013). It draws on two design fiction workshops conducted with researchers involved in the French research programme Subsurface : a Common Good, which investigates sustainable and collective uses of the subsurface. The workshops invited scientists from different disciplines to collectively imagine desirable futures for the Parisian underground through speculative scenarios and artefacts.

Rather than producing predictive visions, these workshops functioned as experimental spaces for collectively interrogating existing assumptions about the underground. The speculative narratives and artefacts produced during the workshops reveal tensions within scientific communities between dominant infrastructural imaginaries and alternative visions emphasizing ecological functions, shared resources, care and new forms of public spaces.

By analysing these workshops as collective practices of anticipation, the paper argues that design fiction can operate as an STS method for pluralizing sociotechnical imaginaries and opening debate on the futures embedded in urban subsurface research.

References:

JASANOFF S., KIM S-J., Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power, University of Chicago Press, 2015.

DUNNE A., RABY F., Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming, The MIT Press, 2013.

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Short abstract

This paper explores narrative worldbuilding and Anticipatory Art Practice as creative anticipatory methods through which participants construct speculative cities and reflect on how ecological, social, and cultural dynamics shape possible urban futures.

Long abstract

Cities confronting climate change, infrastructural transformation, and social uncertainty increasingly rely on anticipatory methods to explore possible futures. Yet many foresight approaches remain largely analytical or technocratic, limiting their capacity to engage diverse actors in imagining and negotiating urban futures. This paper explores two complementary creative and speculative approaches: Narrative Worldbuilding and Anticipatory Art Practice, as participatory methods for constructing and interrogating possible urban futures.

The first approach builds on Doyle’s method of narrative worldbuilding, developed for over a decade at the Irish National Film School. Originating in film production practices for constructing coherent fictional environments, the method adapts cinematic worldbuilding techniques for participatory futures research. Participants investigate ecological systems, flora and fauna, urban infrastructures, cultural dynamics, and population patterns. These inquiries inform the collaborative construction of plausible speculative worlds through which future cities can be explored. Conceptually, this approach engages with Doyle’s Cone of Pluraversality, inviting reflection on how diverse and situated futures might unfold.

Complementing this approach, Anticipatory Art Practice, developed by Doherty, integrates futures literacy with socially engaged art. Within this framework, the Futures Métissage method creates dialogical spaces where diverse perspectives and imaginaries of living together in future urban contexts can emerge and interact.

The paper argues that creative anticipatory practices function as infrastructures of imagination. By combining narrative worldbuilding with participatory artistic methods, participants critically examine assumptions about urban futures and collaboratively articulate more plural and regenerative pathways for urban resilience and sustainability.