What are desirable ideas about the urban future? How would we imagine the future? A research consortium is developing and testing a tool that gives people new perspectives on the large-scale urban transformation. How can people be empowered to participate in the debate on how we want to live – or do not want – in the city of the future? How can we encourage them to question the paths they have taken and to participate in the development and implementation of a major urban transformation? In order to initiate a new, meaningful debate about the various possible futures, the research project develops ‚Xtopias‘ as innovative tools.
Xtopias are, on the one hand, content-related products that combine and integrate utopias and dystopias related to urban open space – be they technological, ecological, urban planning, economic or social. On the other hand, they are methodological tools that transfer topics into practical experience by means of suitable, actively involving formats – for example, from art and futurology or from the field of Education for Sustainable Development.
The aim of these tools is to facilitate mental and emotional access to possible futures: the ability to think and feel one’s way into visions of the future, to analyze them, to formulate new visions of one’s own, and in turn to reflect critically on them. Xtopias go beyond the future perspectives of current transformative research: they draw extreme visions regardless of current conditions and realizabilities and consciously focus on the ambivalences of utopian and dystopian visions.
Within the scope of a “Year of Xtopias“, the project team, together with local urban actors, is testing and evaluating exemplary xtopias as interventions at three locations. In doing so, it will be examined to what extent each individual xtopia stimulates the ability and motivation to deal with the future creatively, creatively or critically. Based on the practical tests, the xtopias will then be revised and made available to other cities for implementation.
The project “Urban Xtopias – Open Spaces of the Future“ is funded by the Robert Bosch Stiftung over a period of three years and consists of a research association with seven partners, including the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Transition Town Eberwalde, and the Westphalian University of Applied Sciences. The German Institute of Urban Affairs (Difu) manages the network together with the University of Kassel.
