Speakers
Description
Planning has a major role in shaping the imaginaries of hopeful and resilient futures. In a world increasingly defined by polycrises, planning is confronted with the urgency for transformative thinking. Despite acknowledging the need for just and sustainable futures (Elmqvist, 2018), planning visions often remain technocentric or dystopian, maintaining the myth of human-nature separation and perpetuating a narrow reactive perspective on futures. Speculative fiction, a genre defined by centering the imaginative over the literal, goes beyond techno-centered survivalism by revealing the limitations of traditional imaginaries (Bina et al. 2020). Speculative fiction has a unique capacity to provoke deep engagement with complex uncertainties, redefining present problems through possible futures, finding alternatives to traditional – sometimes unconscious – societal structures, offering planning education possibilities for imagining futures that are unbound by the constraints of the present. Imagination as such is thereby understood as a cornerstone of transformative education.
Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship, this paper situates speculative fiction as a means of reconceptualizing resilience through narratives that challenge the reductive binaries of human and non-human, urban and ecological, instead embracing relational and systemic thinking. Central to this is the framing of speculative fiction as a collaborate act of world-building. Unlike traditional planning exercises, which often prioritize immediate problem-solving, speculative fiction encourages students to craft long-term, transformative visions. Incorporating speculative fiction into planning education offers a path toward realizing not only the potential of students but also the transformative possibilities of the field itself (Pereira et al. 2019).
The aim of this paper is to explore the potential of speculative fiction as a transformative tool for planning education, enabling students and educators to imagine positive and hopeful futures that are rooted in interconnectedness and resilience. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with Finnish university-level planning educators, the paper explores how speculative storytelling can inspire planning education, fostering a capacity for imagination and creative engagement with the uncertainties and complexities of possible futures. The preliminary findings suggest that by inviting students to envision alternative futures, speculative fiction fosters not only a capacity for critical reflection but also a proactive ethos rooted in hope and resilience. By integrating speculative fiction into planning education, students are encouraged to move beyond the limitations of current paradigms. They are invited to consider futures where resilience is intertwined with justice, where diversity is not merely tolerated but celebrated. However, the implementation of speculative fiction is not straightforward, as the field is still strongly embracing the use of more evidence-based and analytical methods.
References
Bina, O., Inch, A., & Pereira, L. (2020). Beyond techno-utopia and its discontents: On the role of utopianism and speculative fiction in shaping alternatives to the smart city imaginary. Futures, 115, 102475. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2019.102475
Elmqvist, T. (Ed.). (2018). The urban planet: Knowledge towards sustainable cities. Cambridge University Press.
Pereira, L. M., Hichert, T., Hamann, M., Preiser, R., & Biggs, R. (2018). Using futures methods to create transformative spaces. Ecology and Society, 23(1). https://www.jstor.org/stable/26799045
| Keywords | speculative fiction; planning education; hope; imagination; sustainability transformation |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
