Seminar series: Friends of the Future
The Friends of the Future seminars are the Urban Futures Studio’s take on public seminars: warm, interactive, and focused on hope. Regularly, we invite an academic, activist, artist, or practitioner to chat with us on the sofa in front of a circle of colleagues and guests. All are welcome at room 1.02 (Vening Meinesz Building A).
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Previous seminars
On April 8th Deana Jovanović joined us for an engaging Friends of the Future seminar to present her new book 'Staging the Promises'. Deana is an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Utrecht University. She studies how people make futures, interact with pipes and cables, and live with airborne particles in industrial environments. Guest panellists Professor Kei Otsuki and Dr. Jesse Hoffman joined Deana to discuss her book that reveals how inhabitants of Bor, a Serbian copper-processing and mining town that lived through prosperous Yugoslav times and a post-socialist decline, were the audience theatrically performed promises of aspirational futures.
In her book, Deana Jovanović chronicles the efforts of the copper-processing company and the town's authorities to theatrically perform promises of better economic, urban, environmental, infrastructural and post-industrial futures. Her book asks: What impact did the staging of promises have on the residents? What temporal, material, and political effects did these performances generate? How did they shape the citizens' futures and their present?
Jovanović offers many ethnographic examples of ambivalence in people's orientation to their futures, while residents balanced hope with despair, disillusionment, and dismay. Staging the Promises highlights how the performances shaped the present, and how, in a Gramscian twist, they sustained hope alongside power dynamics that residents often criticized.
Staging the Promises assesses the performative ways through which contemporary capitalist futures are remade. For Jovanović, Bor represents a site that reflects a current global trend: staging the promises of enhanced futures today play a significant role in contemporary populist politics. Through them, she argues, distant futures become gradually withdrawn from people's horizons.
On March 31st Mathias Thaler joined us for an engaging Friends of the Future seminar to discuss his latest book 'No Other Planet', published in 2022. Thaler is a professor of Political Theory in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh. His main research interest is in contemporary political theory. Thaler regularly teaches courses on democratic theory, populism, human rights and the morality of war and violence.
Visions of utopia – some hopeful, others fearful – have become increasingly prevalent in recent times. Thaler's new book: No Other Planet examines expressions of the utopian imagination with a focus on the pressing challenge of how to inhabit a climate-changed world. Forms of social dreaming are tracked across two domains: political theory and speculative fiction. The analysis aims to both uncover the key utopian and dystopian tendencies in contemporary debates around the Anthropocene; as well as to develop a political theory of radical transformation that avoids not only debilitating fatalism but also wishful thinking. No Other Planet juxtaposes theoretical interventions, from Bruno Latour to the members of the Dark Mountain collective, with fantasy and science fiction texts by N. K. Jemisin, Kim Stanley Robinson and Margaret Atwood, debating viable futures for a world that will look and feel very different from the one we live in right now.
On March 18th Sören Altstaedt joined us for an engaging Friends of the Future seminar to share insights from his research on the 1970s Limits to growth debates. Sören is a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies. His research revolves around the social dimensions of climate change, sustainability and energy transitions. In this seminar, he revisited the heated controversies that erupted following the publication of the Limits to Growth report in 1972. Commissioned by the Club of Rome and crafted by a group of MIT scientists, the report documented the results of the first computer simulation of human interaction with the global environment. Using a novel modelling technique called System Dynamics, MIT scientists projected that if the exponential growth of the global population and industries continued unchecked, the world system would face a socio-ecological collapse in the 21st century.
The Limits to Growth debates have often been painted as a clash between two ideological camps: pessimistic neo-Malthusians versus optimistic techno-utopians. However, previously unexplored archival material from MIT reveals a deeper, decade-long methodological struggle between MIT’s System Dynamics Group and econometricians over the validity of their respective modelling practices. This earlier scientific conflict shaped the battle lines of the 1970s debates: assuming the popular position of “economists”, critics of the report largely favoured econometric modelling, while its defenders, often identifying as “ecologists”, resonated with System Dynamics’ holistic approach. Thus, the Limits to Growth controversies pertained not only to the normative question of what the future will look like but also, to a significant degree, to the epistemological and methodological question of how to imagine it – how to give it form through specific models. Our current perceptions of what the future actually is, what actions to take, and what goals to seek, have been forged in this clash of futures that marked the 1970s.
On February 18th Kei Otsuki joined us for for an engaging Friends of the Future seminar to share insights from ‘Following Frontiers of the Forest City. Otsuki is a professor of International Development Studies at the Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning here at Utrecht University. Otsuki will
The 'Following Frontiers of the Forest City' project evolves around the highly contested plan to relocate Indonesia’s national capital city from Jakarta to the forest highlands of eastern Kalimantan. Through an innovative ‘Forest City’ master plan, proponents argue that the relocation of the capital city decentralises development opportunities and alleviates Jakarta’s environmental problems. Critics contend, however, that the relocation leaves Jakarta’s problems unsolved, and the new city will negatively impact Kalimantan’s ecosystem and societies. Both arguments fail to address how the new Forest City might lead to sustainable and inclusive urbanisation.
2024
On December 16th, Erika Summers-Effler joined the Urban Futures Studio for an engaging Friends of the Future seminar about her work on the nexus of emotions, culture, social movements and religion combining the disciplines of micro-sociology and cognitive brain science. Why do people keep fighting for social causes in the face of consistent failure? Why do they risk their physical, emotional and financial safety on behalf of strangers? How do these groups survive turnover and emotional burnout? Together with Erika, in this session, we explored how emotional dynamics between people and within the self can explain social inertia as well as the possibility for resistance and change. She works as an associate professor at the Department of Sociology of the University of Notre Dame, Indiana.
On 2 December 2024, Annette Markham joined the Urban Futures Studio for an engaging Friends of the Future seminar starting with a review of a series of workshops focused on the challenge of incorporating sensory and affective lived experience into smart city data ecosystems. “Mapping the moods of the future city” workshops, held in Barcelona, Ho Chi Minh City, and Melbourne in 2022, invited residents, neighbourhood leaders, and city planners to creatively build moodboards of affective and emotional aspects of their cities and discuss how this information translates into data for future digital twins. Annette will discuss key features and methods, as well as the value of provoking failure in creative interventions to push past speculative imaginaries to more concrete discussions of granular, practical aspects of future making.
Annette is Chair Professor of Media Literacy and Public Engagement at Utrecht University. She is also creator and director of the Future Making Research Consortium, a collaboratory to bring together scholars, artists, and activists, particularly early career researchers, to study the intersection of digital technology, ways of being in the world, and future possible meanings, practices, and social structures.
On 8 July 2024, Edgar Pieterse joined the Urban Futures Studio for an engaging Friends of the Future seminar about a new project he and his team are working on: “Explorer Box 1: Emergence”. The exhibition-in-a-box will be the starting point for a rich discussion. The portable exhibition supports important conversations about urbanization in the Global South through a curated set of posters, booklets, games, music and other tools, and will soon be replicated in multiple locations across the world.
Edgar Pieterse is a professor and director of the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town.
On March 28th 2024, Roanne van Voorst joined the Urban Futures Studio for an engaging Friends of the Future seminar about her latest research. Roanne is a futures anthropologist, writer, columnist and president of the Dutch Future Society. Although anthropology has traditionally focused on the past, there has been a growing interest in future-oriented research in recent years. However, this is not easy for a discipline that primarily relies on fieldwork as its primary data source: methods and tools to study futures in an anthropological manner still need to be developed. Van Voorst is one of those developers. She is affiliated with the University of Amsterdam, where she leads ERC-funded research into the future of healthcare. In her work, she combines Futures-Thinking methods with classical anthropological and ethnographic methods.
On 19 February 2024, Tatiana Sokolova, PhD candidate at Södertörn University, joined us for an engaging Friends of the Future seminar about her research project ‘Co-producing knowledge, imagination and action: The role of democratised knowledge-governance interfaces in sustainability transformations’.This conversation traced the different ways of knowing and unknowing in what might be at the heart of today’s sustainability crises: the society’s ability to cultivate different kinds of political imagination – or a lack of it.
Tatiana took a brief foray into metaphors and imaginaries of sustainability as ‘journey’ and ‘mobilisation’; political ontologies of ‘green modernity’, ‘resistance’ and ‘planetary boundaries’; and closed with the question: if and how social mobilisation might be charting maps of ‘real utopias’? All these ways of imagining the present and future of sustainability transformations are intricate interplays between knowledge and power.
2023
On 30 November, artists Ekaterina Volkova and Julien F. Thomas joined the Urban Futures Studio for an engaging Friends of the Future seminar about art-science collaborations. These collaborations are often pitched as a means for improving communication between scientists and the public. Conversely, the collaborative journey between the Urban Futures Studio and two artists suggests that a key insight from collaborations between scientists and artists is the chance for each party to critically reflect on their assumptions and practices.
Volkova and Thomas together make up Perception Design Studio, a social and graphic design bureau that explores the role of creative practices to assist scientist and policymakers. Guided by Maarten Hajer and Detlef van Vuuren, they collaborated with Lisette van Beek to produce a Future Manual for Future Models.
On 16 October 2023, we had the privilege to hear from dr. Fatima Denton during our Friends of the Future seminar. Denton is director of the Institute for Natural Resources in Africa of the United Nations University in Accra, Ghana, which she joined in 2018. She is the holder of the Prince Claus Chair in Equity and Development of Utrecht University since 2022. She has worked with the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, where she co-ordinated the African Climate Policy Center. In her work, she has straddled research and policy. Recently she was a co-ordinating Lead Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report on Climate Change and Land.
On 21 September 2023, Paul Graham Raven joined us for an engaging Friends of the Future seminar. Paul is a writer, researcher and consulting critical futures practitioner. As a researcher, he was affiliated to Lund University and Malmö University among others and contributed to the newly published book 'Futures Brough To Life'. Previously, Paul was part of the three-year research project Climaginaries, he has been editor-in-chief for webzine 'Futurismic', and developed a new interpretation of the Tarot with design agency Superflux.
On 31 May 2023, Michael Uwemedimo joined us for an engaging Friends of the Future seminar. Michael is an accomplished film producer and the co-founder of the Human City Project. His work has been recognized through his Academy Award-nominated and BAFTA-winning documentary, The Act of Killing. During the seminar, Michael discussed his innovative participatory filmmaking and AI image generation methodologies that enable communities to expand their collective imagination and actively participate in the shaping of their neighbourhoods.
As co-founder and project director of the Human City Project, a community-driven media, architecture, planning, and human rights initiative in Nigeria, Michael is exploring design processes through which violently marginalized urban communities might gain a greater measure of control over the shaping of their cities.
On 5 April 2023, dr. Lewis Akenji joined the Urban Futures Studio for the third edition of the Friends of the Future seminar. Akenji introduced the 1.5-degree lifestyles approach and the implications of lifestyle changes to achieving the Paris Agreement. In his talk, he explored how climate change links to social issues such as inequality and poverty, individual change versus systems change, and emerging thoughts on eco-social policies for the sustainability transition.
Dr. Lewis Akenji is the managing director of the Hot or Cool Institute, a Berlin-based public interest think tank that explores the intersection between society and sustainability. It brings together researchers and practitioners to facilitate solutions to global problems. Lewis has consulted with organizations, including United Nations agencies, the Asian and African Development Banks, the European Commission, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and has served as technical or science-policy adviser to several national government delegations.
On 16 October 2023, we had the privilege to hear from dr. Fatima Denton during our sixth Friends of the Future seminar.
Denton is director of the Institute for Natural Resources in Africa of the United Nations University in Accra, Ghana, which she joined in 2018. She is the holder of the Prince Claus Chair in Equity and Development of Utrecht University since 2022. She has worked with the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, where she co-ordinated the African Climate Policy Center. In her work, she has straddled research and policy. Recently she was a co-ordinating Lead Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report on Climate Change and Land.
For the first edition of the Friends of the Future seminar, we're inviting Assistant Professor Quinlan Bowman. On February 21st 2023, Bowman discussed his manuscript-in-progress on democratic innovations, co-authored with Mark Bevir. The manuscript attempts to expand our democratic imaginaries, illustrating how citizens can meaningfully participate throughout the policy process at diverse geographic scales. The included case studies explore innovative practices for citizen participation in public opinion formation, agenda setting, legislation, implementation, monitoring and oversight, and conflict resolution.
Quinlan Bowan is an Assistant Professor of Ethics and Public Policy at Duke Kunshan University (China) and an Assistant Professor of the Practice of Global Studies at Duke University. He co-directs the Citizenship Lab in the Humanities Research Center at Duke Kunshan University. Quinlan is also a member of the Diversity Scholars Network of the National Center for Institutional Diversity.