Cities of Other Worlds - A Call for Imaginative Urban Explorations

Floods, water shortages, increasingly frequent and prolonged heatwaves, gated communities and immense slums -- those are the features of the cities in the age of climate change. But other things are also occurring in the cities such as measures for the reduction of private traffic, the blooming of urban gardens, and the multiplication of grassroots environmentalist organizations. These are some of the ways in which climate change materializes in the urban context.

To understand how younger generations experience present climate change and imagine the future, OCC! launches an imaginative exploration of our cities in 200 years. How will our cities be in the year 2200? It may be a dystopian reality, a paradise or a hyper-technological hell, or maybe it will be dominated by the return of wild nature or a completely new ecosystem with living beings that we do not know yet...

Our call for imaginative urban explorations is open to all people, and especially to high school and university students. We invite to imagine how either one’s own city or one of the five cities studied in the OCC! project (New York, Rio de Janeiro, Istanbul, Malmo, and Naples) will be in the year 2200. Our project aims to create an atlas of future cities – Cities of Other Worlds –, which will offer an inventory of the urban fears, hopes, anxieties, and fantasies of young generations.

If you are willing to participate, do contact us at ehlab@abe.kth.se

OCCImaginativeCities.pdf (pdf 2.7 MB)

Graphic by Elisa Privitera.