“Speculative fiction is a policy tool”
An interview with ICV Creative Resident, urban planner, and futurist Lafayette Cruise
Welcome to the latest installment of our Q&A series with our talented Creative Residents! As part of the ICV Creative Residency, we provide brainstorming buddies, creative support, and a stipend to some of the most inspiring entrepreneurs, designers, and engineers — and wait to see what they do with it.
In today’s edition (check out previous stories here), we talk with the urban planner and futurist Lafayette Cruise, a multi-hyphenate who uses stories as a tool to shape the reality of our cities. Lafayette is using his time in the residency to create a work of speculative fiction that examines what the future could look like if we treated the needs and experiences of adolescents as valid. Keep reading to learn more about what’s next for the project, why speculative fiction is a policy tool, and why we shouldn’t be so afraid of teenagers in public spaces.
Hi! Can you share a brief introduction — who are you and what do you do?
Hi, I’m Lafayette Cruise. I’m an urban planner and futurist and I create speculative world-building projects. I currently lead world building and urban design studios at the Rhode Island School of Design. I spend a lot of my time thinking about how the cities we build and the stories we consume work together to shape who believe belongs in the future and how we believe we’ll practice belonging in the future.
What does a futurist like you do?
In the traditional sense, it’s really looking at forecasts and trends to think about what the future holds. A lot of my work positions that from an urban planning perspective and how we design spaces in cities.
What are you currently working on as part of the Residency?
It’s a speculative fiction project called My 13th Birthday at the Bowling Alley. It imagines a future where early adolescents are centered in our design of digital and physical public spaces. What does mundane life look like when you’re about to celebrate your 13th birthday in a world where we see that as a valid age, and not just a future adult or a problem to be controlled? When society sees you as someone to connect with, to be nurtured, and a person to who needs to feel like they belong?
Where did the inspiration for this project come from?
A number of things. It first started when I was doing substitute teaching in my hometown in Wisconsin, and I started to see kids in a different light. In American society, we often see adolescents as these scary things — problems. With the middle schoolers, I realized: every single adult was like that once. We’ve all been through that weird time of life. Teenagers aren’t some abnormal, horrible thing — they’re just being teenagers. They’re both incredibly sweet, but also incredibly terrible because they’re practicing being adults.
It was also interesting for me to see how once you get to high school, there’s a divide in who’s been made to feel like they belong — both in school and broadly in society — and those who aren’t. That sparked a curiosity for me of what structurally and socially needs to happen to change that.
And then there’s another part of inspiration around tech policy and the ways in which children are used as a sort of a political idea, not an actual reality. They’re not allowed to actually engage and have agency. When we talk about places being child-friendly what we really mean is that it’s easy for you as a parent to surveil your child. Or if a space is designed for children, it’s for babies and toddlers, not a 13-year-old where you need some supervision but you’re also becoming a little more independent. It creates a messy problem place that our structures don’t like dealing with, but teenagers exist everywhere.
This led to questions around: what does it mean to actually see teenagedom as legitimate? Not as a threat, not as a political tool, not as an idea, but as actual people in our society?
Where do you hope this project will lead? What do you want people to do with it?
I want the project to do a few things:
- I want teenagers to feel more agency and participate in dictating the futures they want. That age is so fleeting and difficult, but it’s an important time to feel like you belong in the future and that people like you can shape the future.
- For parents, I want them to think about how to contextualize what it means for your teenager to have a different relationship to technology? Is there a way that we can think about it that isn’t so scary?
- For people without children, I want them to see teenagers as less threatening and instead as people who are in need of connection and cultural and social support. That their stage of life isn’t just about preparing for the workforce, but preparing people to continue to be members of the community.
Why speculative fiction? What is it about the medium that you find so compelling?
Ultimately, I think urban planning is speculative fiction. Urban policy is ultimately a fictional story about the changes we want to see. Short stories, films, and comics — all of this media that shapes our expectations for what we want in the real world. So how can we use that as a policy tool to shape the physical world?
I lived in Chicago for a while. And if you look at the way that Chicago was developed post-Chicago fire, it was this one person’s imagining of the future. It didn’t have to develop that way. I hope that we can tell different stories to shape the physical fabric of the world that we live in. That we don’t center powerful white men, but we expand to look at the margins and see what other ways of being could exist.
How else does urban planning impact our lives?
The way you design a street shapes how you drive on that street and shapes whether or not you feel comfortable walking down that street, depending on who you are, your gender, race, class, sexuality, and more. The way you move through a space can either feel marginalizing, making you feel small or othered, or it can make you feel comfortable. So much of our cities are designed for men. How you’re able to get around can limit your options and your ability to connect.
How do you find inspiration for what you work on?
I’m curious about spaces, people, and their stories. When I see someone in a city, I want to know: How did you get here? What’s that story? I think about a city: How was this formed? How was the land formed? Who were the people who were here first? How has that culture translated into the architecture, into the way that the street is laid out?
I’m also a child of cartoons and Lord of the Rings and other fantasy novels. I spent a lot of my childhood making up worlds. That filters into my work as well, where I’m constantly putting myself in other people’s shoes and trying to understand what it feels like to live their lives.
What drives your artistic practice and how does it change over time? Do you see your work as being in conversation or reacting to anything?
I’m constantly trying to imagine and empathize with other people, but also create new worlds based on that. I’m also in the process of trying to be comfortable using any sort of medium that I can get my hands on, to explore the ways in which the worlds I’m imagining would manifest themselves. Writing is the default, but I’m practicing drawing, working in video and audio, and exploring new mediums.
Who and what are you inspired by these days?
Quite a few things!
- I always go back to Octavia Butler. Her way of building and writing stories around something that the dominant culture doesn’t notice and exploring that through sci-fi and fantasy is incredible.
- I recently reread Franny Choi’s Soft Science poetry collection. It’s a beautiful conversation involving a human and an android (I think) that questions AI as an alternative intelligence.
- Another very of the moment thing that’s inspiring me is this rap song that kids in Ireland made during a youth festival. What does it mean to give kids a platform like this, to create something they want?
- The artist Stephanie Dinkins introduced me to this idea of Afro-now-ism, building on Afrofuturism. How do we take our vision for the future and really embody that liberated experience that we want in the present? Stephanie also has this beautiful art piece called Bina48, where she’s training a language model of herself to be in conversation with her partner when she passes.
- Finally, I continued to be inspired by the work that Carla LynDale Bishop is doing with Mapping Blackness, a geo-locative digital archive for rural Black stories.
Let’s talk about your process. How do you start approaching an idea for speculative fiction?
Often, a project is usually something that I’ve been ruminating on for a while and when an opportunity like the ICV Creative Residency comes around, I’ll use that time to work on it. Part of the idea for this project was around, what would have wished for myself at 13? What do I wish for now? I appreciate cities where I see teenagers taking up space when it’s not just going to and from school. I prefer those sorts of cities.
Something else I’ve been ruminating on vampires. I’ve been thinking a lot about Silicon Valley’s obsession with longevity. I want to involve poetry. But that’s a whole other project.
Let’s talk about tools. What’s in your stack?
In the rumination phase, I compile a mix of sketches and a notebook. Usually I keep a folder with photographs and other ideas. When it comes to producing, it depends on the project. For the residency right now, it’s been a lot of Photoshop and Adobe Fresco on my iPad, cutting out images for collages, as well as these worldbuilding sessions on Figma. I also keep a lot of notes in Microsoft Word or Google Docs.
Can you give us a brief tour of your work station?
What do you find most exciting about emerging technologies like AI, ML, and crypto?
The thing I find most exciting is this moment of sort of discourse. Theoretically, what does it mean to engage with AI as an alternative intelligence? We don’t fully understand some of the technologies, so what does it mean to have a set of ethics around things we don’t fully understand, rather than thinking of it as something to exploit? In a dream world where stuff wasn’t so centralized and there was a lot more like individual ownership, could you and your friends design a sort of amalgamation of yourselves? What does it mean to design these tools to give us space for creativity?
In theory, AI ought to give us more time and space for us to focus on other labor — like the cultural labor, the social labor, and the familial relational labor that we often don’t have time to do.
Crypto opens up a discourse around what is a currency and what is trust and what does it mean to own your data?
What do you find most worrying about these technologies?
What I find worrying about these technologies is the ways in which existing power structures are playing out in their use and development. Crypto, for example, tends to benefit those who already benefit from fiat currency. For AI, it’s the environmental impacts of computing, and the worrying impact of the logic that we need to continue to grow and scale. There is a sort of structural logic to business in this country that’s not going to allow us to see these technologies used as the liberatory powers that they are.
Any words of advice for other creators like yourself?
Don’t be afraid of the interesting, creative, imaginative, and expansive parts of yourself. Don’t acquiesce those parts of yourself to a world that says that they aren’t profitable, that they’re not valuable. It’s hard to give yourself the time to interrogate and sit in those parts of yourself, and it ends up becoming a necessity to make that time for yourself, to seek out the opportunities and the people who support that kind of thinking.
So much of the future is malleable. The stories we tell about the future shape what we do with it. So we need you. We need more imagination. We need more stories. We need other perspectives from which to orient our imaginations of the future in new ways.
Stay tuned for more news from Lafayette as he finishes out the residency. Interested in becoming our next creative resident? Apply here.
