Imagining the Future for Transformation – master’s elective
The Urban Futures Studio offers the master’s elective ‘Imagining the future for transformation’. In this course, students embark on a ten-week journey as members of the social movement - 'Creative Collectives for Utopia' (CC4Utopia), which serves as a critical and imaginative friend for transformative societal initiatives. CC4Utopians learn how to become both an archaeologist and co-designer of the future:
- An archaeologist in the sense of uncovering the politics and dynamics that have narrowed what futures we see as plausible, or even possible.
- A co-designer through their collaboration with diverse societal groups to generate approaches that can convincingly challenge the status quo and help expand our imagination and action towards more just and sustainable futures.
Publications
Visions of better worlds (2024)
CC4Utopians then put their learning to practice by engaging with different societal contexts. In the first two years of the course, we worked with societal groups who use futuring approaches to enable societal transformation in Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America. This year, we focused specifically on contexts in the Netherlands where there is a profound crisis of imagination—sea level rise in Zeeland, the Dutch dairy farming transition, and the EU’s green energy transition. CC4Utopians designed six situations which seek to break open the futures that are commonly seen as possible or desirable in these contexts.