On storytelling, narratives and future cities

This post is based on two recent talks I did — Concrete&Ink: Storytelling and the Future of Visionary Architecture at the Whitechapel Gallery and Speculative Futures: In flight.

My story about future cities starts in the past. The city I grew up in, Bucharest, looked a bit like this in the early 90s. In a freshly post-communist country trying to figure out what next in terms of governance but also in terms of visions for its future, as I child I was gripped by a particular commercial for Marlboro — and to this day if I squint my eyes I can press play and see cowboys chasing wild horses with lassos while the golden light of the setting sun bathed the American prairie.

As a 6 year old I didn’t make much of the the visual symbolism — I just liked the horses. Unpacking the visuals now, themes such as the human control seeking to “tame” the “wild”, the conquest of the unknown, or the expression of identity through consumer choices become apparent.

However, what took even longer to realise, was that this was a minor artefact part of a broader, wider, centuries-long process of colonising the capacity to imagine and aspire. Like many other Eastern-European countries, Romania didn’t stand a chance in figuring out for itself what kinds of visions for the future it aspired to; instead Western values and consumer desires swiftly took over and were welcomed as a knee-jerk rejection of the previous communist regime.

Fast forward a few decades, and exploring the role of future imaginaries has become a big part of my work. I’ve been fascinated by the ways we’ve been imagining the future in the past and have written about it here. Going beyond the role of visual cues, I was reminded by a recent article from the author Tim Maughan about a number of novels from the 20th century that were imagining what the world would be like around the year 2020. Reading between the lines the themes are chillingly familiar — consumer tech, self-optimisation, racism, populism, climate change, refugee crisis. Even the current obsession with cute pets.

If the activist Marian Wright Edelman once said “you can’t be what you can’t see”, then my question is — what if we’ve just become what we’ve imagined?

These novels were part of a broader shift to postmodernism that came about with such momentum, that there was no time to reflect on what might this mean more broadly beyond literature. Shifting the focus to first person also meant that our values and mental models were centred for the first time in history on the “I”, and we’re only starting to see the effects of this shift as a much wider, much deeper collapse of context — apparent in trends such as a growing lack of trust in institutions, the myth of the hero very much pervasive in change narratives, the rise of personal branding or the endless pursuit of authenticity as a core value at both individual and organisational level.

And yet, the cyberpunk urban aesthetic didn’t quite materialise. Instead a web of invisible technologies weaves itself around us, through us, above and below us, while the urban aesthetic explores innocent shades of beige stone. Shannon Mattern has recently brought this to life in her exploration of the many paradoxes baked into “smart” approaches to city making such as the Sidewalk Labs masterplan for Toronto.

Closer to home, I’ve been more and more impressed by the rapacious capacity of capitalism to appropriate language and devoid it of its meaning. My favourite — and perhaps not too far off from the Sidewalk utopia, is the urban lab space at the top of Coal Drops year in King’s Cross, where you can use a Samsung phone as a “graffiti spray can” (top left corner). Notice the dramatic staging of the lighting as well.

Language plays such an important role in this process of framing our urban experiences and setting our expectations. You look at the components of the cartoon on the left and you wonder “what’s not desirable in here?” — there’s renewable energy, allotments, people walking and cycling, and even dubious forms of air balloon transport. And yet, it’s portrayed as a dystopian future where the dirty hippies have won.

All of this is to say — utopia and dystopia are not two static, polar outcomes or arrival points, but active processes of socio-political negation of how we live and how we make decisions. I’ve explored some of the barriers — such as the strong grip of Western imaginaries such as my childhood obsession with Marlboro, the unfolding impacts of focusing on the individual rather than the collective but also some of the opportunities — to reclaim language, to pay attention to who is framing narratives and why.

My utopia is your dystopia and for many people and communities around the world bearing the brunt of climate change, conflict and systemic racism, dystopia is just called life. To end, I’ll leave you with the wisdom of a quote from Brecht that I love and two questions it raises for me:

How might singing about the dark times be in itself a form of creative resistance?

What might this mean for us as practitioners seeking to cultivate equitable, regenerative futures?