The Future is Ours to Imagine: Creating More Resilient Cities with Speculative Futures
Navigating modern change depends on imagining futures we’ve never seen. Urban planning and design, fields based on using speculation to enact new realities, should be well positioned to spearhead that work. Instead, development often limits the role speculation plays to detrimental effect. Hiding imagination behind calculated rationale results in urban spaces crafted to mitigate threats rather than navigate the unexpected, leaving cities increasingly vulnerable to the uncertainties of 21st century change.
The emerging field of speculative futures offers powerful tools to counter this dangerous trend. By harnessing creative, artistic speculation to challenge the status quo, speculative futures tools can reorient urban development from its longstanding focus on risk aversion to one of provocative possibility. Far from an indulgent creative exercise, using speculative futures is a means of creating the resilient cities we desperately need.
Johanna Hoffman
Johanna Hoffman is an urbanist, researcher, and writer working in the space between design, planning, fiction, and futures. A founder of the research and action institute Design for Adaptation, she uses strategic planning and speculative practice to help communities, cities, and organizations survey the impacts of potential futures and spur proactive adaptation.