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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”.