226 | Johanna Hoffman on Speculative Futures of Cities

0:00:00.1 Sean Carroll: Hello everyone, welcome to The Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. And it may be perfectly clear or maybe I should mention that I'm a city guy by nature. I didn't grow up in the city, I grew up in the suburbs, typical American suburban upbringing. But as soon as I got to move to cities, I realized that that's where I really belong. And I've gotten to live in some great cities here in the United States, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles now in Baltimore. And believe it or not, we've ended up talking about cities quite a bit here on the podcast, this was never one of my intentions starting out, but it turns out there's an enormous amount of interesting things to think about these marvelously complex human environments. We talked with Catherine Brinkley about the science of cities, why they take the shapes they do in particular ways and how to use that to make it better. Very early on in the podcast, we talked to Jeffrey West about the relationship between scale, including density in cities and other things that matter like innovation and creativity, which are concentrated in city-like environments.

0:01:04.3 SC: We talked to Will Wilkinson about cities and politics. There's a strong polarization between the density of the environment you live in and where you land on a political spectrum. And we also talked to Joe Walston about cities and the environment, how urbanization, which you might think is sort of counter to environmental sustainability is actually the best way to create environmental sustainability because it frees up so much land for other uses. So that brings us to today. We're gonna be talking to Johanna Hoffman, who is an urban designer and planner and thinker. So she's gonna talk about how we can think about what cities should be and how best to do that thinking. So in fact, a lot of the conversation we're gonna have is not specifically about this or that urban policy, although that gets there, but more or less a methodology that we can use to think about this, which in true Mindscape fashion is this wonderfully interdisciplinary idea of Speculative Futures, that's also the title of Johanna's new book, Speculative Futures: Design Approaches to Navigate Change, Foster Resilience and Co-Create the Cities We Need.

0:02:13.1 SC: The idea being that if you really wanna be a good urban planner, the mindset you should be in is that of a science fiction writer, really someone who thinks about the future, visualizes different possibilities, and then does systems thinking, attaching different implications to different things that might change in the future. The thing about cities is they're incredibly interconnected, one thing matters to another, transportation, economy, food, pollution, population, a million different things, safety, politics. So it all matters in a way that it is hard to wrap a single grand unified theory around, and instead, it can often help to be a little bit playful, be a little bit speculative, think about how everything interconnects with everything else in a narrative way rather than a strictly top-down way.

0:03:00.1 SC: So I like the conversation because it ranges over all these different kind of avenues and ideas, and it matters. Urbanization is happening more and more people, not just by absolute numbers, but by percentages are living in cities today and will be in the future. So something to think about. Let's go.

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0:03:35.0 SC: Johanna Hoffman, welcome to The Mindscape Podcast.

0:03:37.8 Johanna Hoffman: Thank you so much. A pleasure to be here.

0:03:39.8 SC: We're talking about cities, which we've talked about before in the podcast, and design and the future and speculation, but let me start, I have a softball question, and then I have a tricky question. The softball question is why the focus on cities? What's so great or important about cities?

0:03:57.7 JH: So cities are where a lot of us live, not everybody by any means on the entire planet, but increasingly, and I'm sure this comes as no surprise to the people who are listening to this podcast, more and more of us are moving to cities. When we're looking at a lot of the problems that we're currently facing and that will likely increase in coming years, climatic impacts, political instability, we're looking at a lot of, unfortunately, this is a devastating truth, forced migration, people are going to be moving involuntarily, but out of necessity. Where are they going to land? Likely they're going to land in cities.

0:04:32.7 JH: So increasingly, more and more of us live in cities and moving forward, the size of the amount... The amount of our population that will be living in cities will likely increase. So really investigating cities, how we can make them more resilient, the systems that are required in order to sustain them in more equitable ways is really a way of asking how can we, as a human species, become more resilient, more equipped to handle the changes that are headed our way.

0:05:00.1 SC: It's really remarkable the extent to which urbanization is happening. Like I said, I've done a couple of podcasts on this and just the... It's a sweeping change that we almost take for granted because so many of us do live in cities, it seems natural to us, but it hasn't been like this for very long.

0:05:14.6 JH: No, it's all relatively recent, and I think that's also part of why the scale, the scopes, the speeds of change that we are experiencing even in just this generation, even in just the last 30 years is amazing and quite frightening and also exciting compared to the trajectories and the speeds of change that we'd experienced in the past. So when we're talking about degrees of uncertainty that our systems have to negotiate, that our governance approaches need to be able to handle, they're increasing quite rapidly. And so what are the ways that we can start to collaboratively envision what we might want to do to engage, work with that uncertainty becomes a much more important question.

0:05:56.9 SC: Well, that leads perfectly into my slightly trickier question, which is, when we think about cities historically and maybe moving into the future, how much of their shape and function and so forth is intentional and planned versus how much of it is just sort of spontaneously self-organizing due to the desires of all these different agents trying to do their best?

0:06:17.7 JH: Yeah, it's a great question, and the history of cities is a massive one, and so my particular expertise is in designing systems, strategies, interventions for a relatively present moment and also in the coming future. So I'll just put a disclaimer out there that many people are much more highly qualified to look at the long-term history of cities than I am. That said, when we look at the range of ways that cities have developed over time, you know it's a combination, there's not one extreme or the other. And it very much depends on which particular region we're looking at and what timeframe we're investigating. And new archeological evidence is coming up all the time to challenge pre-existing understanding of what some of those patterns were like, but I would say that it's often a combination of the two. In many different cities, there was some aspect of centralization, again, huge, massive area for research and archeological findings are changing this quite rapidly.

0:07:19.9 JH: If people have not read the Dawn of Everything, by Graeber, and I feel that his co-writer was Weber, amazing findings on just this topic. So again, lots of other areas that people should investigate for more details, but what people are finding is, again, a combination of both a centralized plan of some kind and then also iteration and grassroots response to those plans as people feel into explore remake spaces in order to respond to their actual needs, and we see that in different moments throughout history, I'm thinking a little bit recently in the 20th century, Le Corbusier, very famous architect responsible for a lot of the modernist design that we still see and many different building efforts today and he had a lot of different projects in different parts of the world.

0:08:09.8 JH: And there's some amazing examples, photographic documentation about the way that he would design a space and how it would look when it was first constructed, and then how people who actually live there would change it, whether by hanging things for drying laundry or changing door frames, or shifting the orientation of windows sometimes. We change spaces in order to make them work for what we want. And we do that at different scales according to the amount of organization that we often have within our own families or in our wider communities.

0:08:43.5 SC: What for you are the great success stories of urban planning? I guess urban planning might not be the right phrase 'cause maybe it's too specific, but I think that there have been some semi-notable disasters or these things have gone terribly wrong because people tried to over-plan, but maybe we're not hearing the stories of good things. Maybe, I don't know, Central Park or some other feature of the city that you really needed to sit down and protect by intentional planning rather than just let it happen that way?

0:09:17.0 JH: Again, great question. And what comes to mind immediately since you reference Central Park, is both the good sides of it and also the negative sides of it. That was an effort in large part to spur development on the island of Manhattan. Because at the time that it was planned, in the mid-19th century, there was really not a lot of development that was in the farther north section of the island. And so it was an opportunity really to create a space that around it would invite more development to occur. So it was really a specular practice. It was about raising land values in the area and about spurring more construction. And as I'm sure people have heard, if they're interested in Central Park, there were communities who were living in that area, in that land, some of whom were communities of color that were displaced in the process.

0:10:03.8 JH: So when we look at Manhattan today, it is really valuable to have Central Park there, so helpful to have an open green vegetated space that invites us to go outside, there's a lot of cooling impacts that it has from an infrastructural level. When we look at our parks in general, massively important in terms of absorbing rainfall, in terms of regulating microclimate, so valuable to have those spaces. And I think it's important when we look at anything that is centralized and the way that it is planned and then developed what the negative impacts can be. And in Central Park, yes, people were displaced, their homes were taken away, and those communities were fractured as a result. So positive impact, essential to identify, and it's also a critical thing to ask at what cost?

0:10:50.8 SC: And are there examples besides Central Park that you keep in mind as paradigms of design gone right?

0:11:00.2 JH: Now, since we're on the subject of Frederick Law Olmsted, the Emeralds park system that he created in Boston, I think was quite thoughtful. Again, it was about green infrastructure. So green infrastructure being basically the ways that we can work with natural systems in order to, yes, regulate microclimate, provide spaces for people to gather with each other and also manage, letting capacity as well. This is a slightly more complicated example, but it's also a much more older ancient practice of working with landscape. So when you look at Mexico City, before conquistadors got there, it was Tenochitlan, and they had this really amazing system of Chinampas, which is kind of building up low lying watery areas into agricultural systems.

0:11:48.0 JH: Before conquistadors got there, there were also quite larger islands for different kinds of housing developments or centralized gathering religious spaces. And now when you go to Mexico City, it's not as if the Chinampas are doing great, it's quite a complicated area of the region, and yet they still are used for pretty robust agricultural development. So again, it's not, I think, perfect development, it's gone amazing, but this way of working with a much older form of navigating, working with our landscape is still present today. And there are some farmers who are out there who have generational experience and really strong embedded wisdom for how to manage those spaces. Could they have more support in moving that forward? Absolutely. Could there be better regulations and how a lot of waste water from surrounding areas is flowing into those Chinampas? 100%.

0:12:42.1 JH: And does that negate the value of that particular practice, which again, has been around for a really long time? I don't think so. I think it's worth investigating slightly more technocratic organized means of intervention as well as looking at some of these much older practices that humans have been doing for hundreds and sometimes thousands of years.

0:13:03.3 SC: There's a great point beneath everything you just said, which is that when you think about cities and designing them, you generally don't have a blank slate, right? There is something going on already. It reminds me a little bit, I don't know if this is a good analogy or not, but I did an end of the year podcast where I talked about thinking carefully and slowly, and how this was against in some ways the Silicon Valley ethos, which is getting Elon Musk in trouble right now, because of Twitter, and a legacy software system is a little bit like a city.

0:13:36.1 JH: Yes.

0:13:36.7 SC: It's been built up over time. It's complex. Some things work and we don't know why. And are there dangers in the whole field that you're in of saying, "Well, we can do better than this without realizing how many contingencies there were?"

0:13:51.8 JH: Yes, I think that's a really useful analogy because... And I'm not an engineer, a software engineer, a coding expert, but it's also my understanding that, when it comes to certain satellites that we have put out into space, some of them are quite old now. And so they're using coding language that is not what people use now, and from the people I know who are much more involved in this world than I am, they've told me that that coding language that people used to use back in the '70s, the '80s, was a lot more precise and spare because there just wasn't as much storage space in the memory cards that were used to manage those satellites.

0:14:26.6 JH: And so when it comes to trying to improve or respond, or repair something that's gone wrong, a lot of people today don't have that coding skill, in order to work with this technology that we still ideally would be able to use and rely upon rather than take something down or let it become space junk or spend the money to build something new. So yes, what we're working with is not a blank slate, if we can be more facile in the way that we're able to operate and use systems from different time frames, we stand a chance to really be able to harness our resources in a much more effective way. And cities in some ways, are quite similar in that, in the field, people in the architecture, engineering and construction industries, they often call cities a green field or a brown field. A brown field is often a space that already has development there and a green field is used to describe what is a blank slate essentially.

0:15:24.5 JH: And yet, arguably, just like you said, no place is a blank slate, even if there's no pre-existing structures or infrastructure on it because there's still water flows that are happening, there are still different kinds of soil capacities for absorbing water there, there's different kinds of systems that are already in place. And so pretending as if those systems don't exist can sometimes be okay if you build there for a certain period of time, but usually eventually there will be issues that occur, whether it's flooding, whether it's extreme heat or drought. We live in landscapes that are dynamic, and so pretending as if we don't need to take that dynamic quality into account when we build is setting us up for really problematic context, whether it's in the near term or the slightly longer term. So when I think of how we work with what is pre-existing in cities, it's both within a cultural context, who is there? I infrastructural, what is there? And also the larger context of, how does this operate and respond to the dynamics of the region in which we're situated?

0:16:33.2 SC: Okay, so let's imagine that... Let me put it this way, let's put the audience in the mindset of someone who's trying to think about how we should influence, not even plan, but think about possibilities for the future city, what are the goals, what are the primary things that you keep in mind when you try to imagine what would be a good working future city?

0:17:00.4 JH: I think about it in terms of identifying what are the potential impacts of a particular intervention. So a good city, in my mind, is one where those who live within it have a certain facility with basically systems thinking, if we're going to put in a new transit corridor, for example, what will that transit corridor do in terms of its impact on mobility, for sure, how people are able to move around that given space. But what will that do in terms of family dynamics if we're able to move more quickly efficiently through the places that we lived? Does that mean that we maybe get to spend more time with loved ones, how does that change maybe educational systems? Because if you spend more time, if you're a parent and you have kids and you're spending more time with them, maybe you can help them if they have difficulties in homework, maybe that lessens the burden on public school systems.

0:17:52.7 JH: So again, looking at our interventions within a systemic framework of both infrastructural moves, but then how those infrastructural moves might then impact cultural norms, how they might have an economic impact as well. These things are operating within an interconnected system. How can we become more facile in exploring what those interconnected impacts are so that we can make decisions that will hopefully take us in a preferable trajectory? And I think that's where Speculative Futures tools can be quite helpful because systems thinking is very... It's not the easiest thing to do, not all of us are really primed to think that way, and even when we are identifying causal pathways, one thing that definitely causes another is nearly impossible.

0:18:40.1 JH: It's quite difficult, and you can usually only identify that with certainty long after the fact. So in order to explore still what is systemic context and suite of impacts could be from a potential intervention that somebody is proposing, we have to do our best, and one of the ways that we can communicate that quite effectively with others is through narratives, through visual story time, through experiences that can hopefully render that systemic context in a way that people can respond to.

0:19:10.0 SC: I guess one of the issues is that different people who might ultimately live in the city want different things from it, you know if you're like me and you wanna move to a city, which I just did six months ago...

0:19:22.7 JH: Where did you move?

0:19:22.8 SC: Los Angeles to Baltimore. And what you're thinking of is, where are the restaurants, where are the music venues? Someone else might be thinking of what are the schools like, what is the transportation like? Someone else might be, what about my customer base? Can they afford it? Do I have the right people in the audience and yet keep everybody happy that... I guess I'm just repeating the point you made about systems thinking being very hard.

0:19:46.0 JH: Yeah. Totally, finding a world where all of our different preferred worlds can fit is challenging, and this is not to say that by using Speculative Futures tools, we're gonna come up with the best way to do that, but I think that when we're a lot clear as individuals, as families, as communities, we can be a lot more specific in the ways that we can advocate for those needs and also debate how another group's needs might conflict with our own. So basically, it's not as if having civic debate is something that we're great at in the society at this present moment, just having space to disagree with each other in a thoughtful, respectful way, we're not at a great moment with that.

0:20:29.5 SC: Sadly.

0:20:30.8 JH: That said, very sadly, when we look at the possibility space that potential futures can present to us, I think they're a way of casing some of the disagreements and challenges that we have in terms of really different needs that different communities have, is to acknowledge the fact that the challenges that we currently face won't necessarily last forever. It's not to ignore them or pretend that they don't exist, it's just that 20 years from now, things could very well be different, they're definitely different than they were in the year 2003.

0:21:03.6 JH: So how to allow ourselves to use that possibility space as a way to temporarily say, okay, it's not great right now, but what would we prefer? Let's just give ourselves that moment as individuals, and then if we could have a very specific detailed idea based on research hopefully, on a systemic context, if I can advocate for what I might prefer and you can advocate for what you might prefer, can we see where they may be intersect. Are there commonalities that are hopefully not so much informed by my potential mistrust of your perspective or your confusion about where I'm coming from, if we can use this possibility space to get as detailed as possible and hopefully use communication tools that you can respond to, and me vice versa from you, which again, a storytelling narrative space can be quite helpful in doing that. I think there's a chance for us to find hopefully a space for dialogue that is slightly less fraught than what we often deal with in the present moment, and then work back to today to identify steps to reach hopefully a more commonly held vision of where we wanna go.

0:22:11.7 SC: Well, the emphasis on speculative future is a good one, and I did wanna... Let's take a step back 'cause you're talking about the impact of it and how it can be helpful, I want to give you a chance to tell us what it is, what... Do you have a way of thinking about design in the future of cities? It's right there in the title of your book, and then right there in the beginning of your book, you say, "Wait a minute, aren't all futures speculative, we don't know which one is there," so what exactly do you have in mind when you mean this particular methodology?

0:22:41.6 JH: So Speculative Futures are a suite of design tools for creating high resolution visions of potential realities. Like you say, and this is in the author's note of my book, all visions of the future are inherently speculate, so that phrase is redundant. That's said, because the way is that many of us envision the future, and this is just a basic human tendency, is to use our understanding of the present moment and the past to extend and do some guess work into what we think the future might become. So becoming more, basically having the capacity to challenge the status quo in terms of what we think the future could be is something that often has to be built, we need help in doing that, we need a certain kind of visual framework, we need support from people who help us challenge the ways that we've been trained to see the world in order to expand our ideas of what might actually be able to occur in the future, 'cause when we're talking about the challenges that we face, there are many, climate change is freaky. We have political division in this country that feels like it will never disappear, we have racial inequality that's been going on since some very...

0:23:53.3 JH: All of these problems are very entrenched, and so for many of us when we think about the future, it's really hard again to imagine a reality where those conditions do not just persist, that the status quo doesn't just continue. So Speculative Futures can be a helpful way, especially when they're facilitated by people who are particularly skilled in this practice of inviting us to imagine beyond what is. That can be a way of helping us challenge that status quo thinking and using that possibility space that I mentioned previously as an area to test out alternative trajectories. Again, not with any sort of guarantee that they will definitely come true, but at least to give us the chance to explore what they might be and see how if they're preferable to me, hopefully thing you, to other people, if we might work towards identifying ways of getting there.

0:24:45.3 JH: So these tools come in different forms, science fiction is definitely one, whether it's in written form or it's in film or video, Worldbuilding, when people are familiar with fantasy fiction that often where you think of it, Lord of the Rings is built on Worldbuilding, it's taking a more cohesive vision of what a potential reality might be and really abiding by a set of rules in order to make that reality become real. What are the economic systems of a particular area? What are the geopolitical concerns? Really getting very detailed from a kind of world view.

0:25:21.5 JH: Design fictions are kind of speculative future which is really a way of developing objects that you might need in order to exist in a potential future reality. So it's a way of basically incorporating different sorts of senses in order to feel fill into what the future might be. For some people writing a science fiction story, it's totally what they need in order to get into the details of a potential future. For others, we want to use our touch, we might want to incorporate a sense of smell, and so really honoring the different ways that people explore information and relate to potential trajectories of change is a big part of what Speculative Futures can offer us. They're ways of broadening how we start to talk about some of these very complex issues and how we invite others to experience, debate, explore them with us.

0:26:12.9 SC: When you're talking about science fiction stories, are you talking about literally the stories that have been written or are you talking about a way that urban thinkers and designers like yourself can create new fictional scenarios for your own purposes? The reason why I ask is because when the science fiction writers, as someone who has consulted on Hollywood movies, whether it's sort of science fiction-ey fantasy elements, they don't care about it making sense, they have a story to tell, and that they wanna bring in different elements when they move the story in the direction they want it to move. In other words, they might not be doing Systems Thinking, they might not be thinking through all of the implications of all the... There's all sorts of stories where Time Travel appears and then disappears later on in the story, right? So are you relying or taking inspiration from existing science fictional narratives or are you encouraging designers to think like authors?

0:27:12.1 JH: Before I answer that specific question, I just wanna say that science fiction comes in many different forms of the ways that people are trying to translate research into a narrative form.

0:27:21.8 SC: Sure.

0:27:22.2 JH: And I don't think that all of them are created equal by any means. That said, I think good science fiction writers are quite good researchers and I think they do take the science quite seriously, that they try and explore the ramifications of in their narratives. He, obviously, was very positive about his own work, but Isaac Asimov talked about himself as being a scientist and a researcher first and a science fiction author second. So I just wanna preface this by saying that, and I know that this is true for some people who are writers and production designers in Hollywood, some of them take the science quite seriously.

0:27:58.5 SC: Oh sure.

0:28:00.3 JH: They might not be trained as scientists, but they want to try and get it right, because in order to tell a good story, and I for sure biased, but I think that this is true, the great films that we see, the great science fiction stories that we see are quite based in truth, and then the story, the narrative part is just a departure from where the facts start to end, because if you go a certain trajectory into the future, there's going to be a point at which science can no longer follow.

0:28:25.7 JH: So when I think about the ways that science fiction can be helpful in how we design cities, about how we think about potential trajectories of the future, I'm definitely thinking about the shared narratives that we already have, which is often influenced by the science fiction films, books, etcetera, that are out there already. When we think about dystopian trajectories of change, a lot of us do think about Blade Runner, came out in the '80s, hugely influential just both like a great film and also captured our imagination to, I think, the point where it has created some really devastating impacts, certain cities, developing areas in Asia, for example, different developers have wanted to translate the Blade Runner aesthetic into built physical form.

0:29:13.5 JH: So when we're talking about the ways that science fiction already influences our ideas about cities about what we want to see, it's massive. So when I think about articulating different trajectories of change and exploring preferred future, speculative features tools can be ways for us to take responsibility for the imaginaries that already affect our thinking and be a lot more specific about how we do or don't actually want to enact them and to explore alternatives.

0:29:43.7 JH: So when we look at city making in general today, a lot of planners, architects, designers often use the word, and this is also used in strategic planning and military strategy, the word scenarios. Scenarios is just another word for a potential future. What is the scenario, if we're talking about 10 years in the future, there could be many, but if we're gonna dive into and explore specifics, we're gonna pick one and then get into the details there. Scenarios were coined the phrase by people over at Rand, the think tank based in Santa Monica and other parts of the world, military supported, and they developed scenarios in part to explore basically the ramifications of nuclear Armageddon in the Cold War.

0:30:29.2 JH: One person in particular, a guy named Herman Kahn, many people have probably heard of them, pretty famous, he was a science fiction geek when he was growing up, he loved to read sci-fi. And so when he got to Rand and they were trying to understand ways of responding proactively to some of the tensions in the Cold War, he wanted to basically use sci-fi as a way of exploring these potential trajectories of change to really to coin or to use his phrase, to think about the unthinkable.

0:31:00.2 JH: Nuclear Armageddon is frightening. How do we think about it? You can think about it in terms of playing at a story, doing a war game, which is basically another kind of sci-fi. So rather than say science fiction, because the people who are funding those projects, science fiction doesn't sound serious. How can we come up with a different word? We could call it scenarios, so this is to say that science fiction has already been used for very serious strategic thinking for a long time now, there's a long history of that. And so when we're talking about how designers, architects, planners, strategists, already design cities, they use scenarios, which means that they use sci-fi, they might not do it in as detailed or narrative-ly cohesive way that very good writers do, but they're still using the basic tenants of exploring what the research tells about this potential trajectory of change and trying to understand what that means for daily life, for military operations, for agricultural systems.

0:32:01.3 SC: One of the little consulting gigs that I had was with Ridley Scott, and it was the day I...

0:32:10.0 JH: That must have been fun, what project was that for?

0:32:10.9 SC: It was for one that never got made. He was gonna adapt Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, but he did The Martian instead. So I can't complain, The Martian was really, really good, but it was hilarious to meet him because he had no interest in hearing the scientists, he just wanted to tell stories himself the entire time. That's what he does for a living. And someone mentioned how more cities are beginning to look like a Blade Runner, and he goes, "Yes, and do I earn a penny off of that? No."

[laughter]

0:32:36.7 SC: He would like to monetize the fact that everyone else...

0:32:40.3 JH: There's some intense legality stuff going on there.

0:32:43.5 SC: But of course, it is not meant... It was not meant as a template for future cities, I wonder how much of it was prediction and how much of it was inspiration, were they just foreseeing and not just really Scott, obviously Syd Mead and others working on the look and feel of that film, were they seeing themselves what was gonna inevitably happen to the future of cities, or was it that the movie came out and people said, "Yes, let's make cities look like that."

0:33:11.2 JH: That's a great question, and I would love to hear Ridley Scott's specific thought process on that. My take on it, they made Blade Runner in the '80s on the tail end of a lot of clean modernist focused emphasis on cities being very highly organized and wide boulevards and everything should be clean and green, and Blade Runner was the antithesis of that. They did a lot of research on different... Most of the Asian cities, they spent a lot of time in Taiwan, for example, they spent other time in Japan, and they were looking for the not modern version of city maybe in order to influence what became that really influential production design that Sydney created. And so it was really, I think, about looking at the city as dangerous, as dark, obviously looking at the impacts of new technologies and what it means to relate to non-human intelligent systems and taking a very dystopian look at what that is. And so I think it both as an example of how our tendency towards using dystopia as a means of warning about potential negative structures, which is very useful. That's an important thing, I think, that we as a species do. We see something that is confusing or new, potentially frightening, let's look at what the potential negative impacts could be if it plays out over time.

0:34:33.9 JH: What I think has happened with Blade Runner and many other dystopian-focused narratives, is that when that is the majority of the narratives that we have out there, it shapes our collected thinking to kind of assume that dystopian is the only way forward. Our collective imaginations about what is possible, again, form a kind of underlying assumption that if we don't challenge them or really inquire why we have that assumption to begin with, it can shape so much of our thinking definitely in the present and for sure about where we see our futures taking up us. The ideas about who we are, they're so important for shaping the questions that we ask and how we answer them.

0:35:14.3 SC: You've made a point, but I'll give you a chance to sort of amplify it on how conventional ways of thinking about cities, to bring you back to cities, tend to, I guess, get stuck in ruts, they tend to sort of reinforce the status quo, and one of the things... One of the roles, I guess, of Speculative Futures idea would be to get us out of that rut, to think in new ways. Is that fair?

0:35:37.9 JH: Yeah, definitely, and it makes me think of a conversation that you had with one of your guests in the previous week, I can't remember whom, basically our capacity to imagine into the future of being a fundamental aspect of what it means to be human.

0:35:49.5 SC: Adam Murray, yes.

0:35:49.9 JH: And I'm not an expert like your previous guest was on human and animal behavior, but what I do know is that the part of our brain that is responsible for imagining potential trajectories of change is quite close to the area of our brain that stores our memory. And so the memories that we have, both of our own personal lives and also our understanding of why our cities are the way they are, the way our societies are, the way that they are, the way that humanity has operated over time, we use those memories to re-mix our ideas and inform about how potential future trajectories could occur. We can't imagine in many ways what we have not experienced. And so Speculative Futures, and I'm really just recycling many different amazing pieces of information that other futurists, I'm thinking Stuart Candy, for example, have already stated is that Speculative Futures are ways to explore and then experience potential future in ways that give us new memories, so that we can re-mix more memories that again, are not conditioned on status quo thinking to articulate what we might prefer for our futures.

0:36:57.5 SC: I think I'm on board with the program in general, but never less to mention, we human beings have imaginations, they're crucial to us. It does get tricky sometimes to even use our imaginations to go beyond our everyday experience. As someone once pointed out that in even science fiction, usually the scenario we're looking at is based on one or two big ideas and all of their implications, space travel or the Matrix or synthetic biology and gene editing, but rarely do you get all of them in the same book or scenario, that will be... It will be so different than how we live right now that it will be hard to relate to it. So how do we spur our imaginations to be more comprehensive that way rather than just sort of thinking one big idea and spreading out its implications?

0:37:49.0 JH: Yeah. Again, I think it's a system thinking stuff. And it's, again, not easy to do, but there are certain ways that we can both support our own capacity for systems thinking, and also look to other people who do a good job of exploring in a very systemic way what potential trajectories of change are and do our best to absorb that information. I'm sure everyone's heard of The Ministry of the Future. That's definitely taking a systemic view of a potential trajectory of change. Very detailed, and it's not looking at just a technological intervention or what happens when nuclear war occurs. It's trying to say, "Hey, this is a trajectory." Kim Stanley Robinson is looking specifically at climate change and what happens from a global perspective when the current trajectories that we are facing start to unfold. But he asks, I think, the very valuable question of not just what does a potential positive response look like, but what are the challenges involved in any sort of positive response.

0:38:45.6 JH: So he takes... He calls it up-topia. Basically, it's not about articulating or exploring utopia. It's about utopia as a process, that there is no destination that is ideal, that it's really about if we're trying to give ourselves the thought exercise, let alone come up with a strategic plan, let's just think about it, doing it from a systemic perspective, essential, and looking at the challenges that are inherent that if you, for example, come up with a trajectory of change, it's not necessarily gonna be great for me. So let's play that out. If it's not great for me, what might I do in response and what might I try and cultivate in terms of conversations with my colleagues, my support system, in order to challenge you back? But if we're moving towards a positive trajectory, and we have this challenge between us now, what might happen over time that's not entirely negative?

0:39:44.1 JH: So, again, Kim Stanley Robinson, not all of us are writers like he is. We don't have to be. But what we can do is both look towards different uptopian, another word for it is protopian, not dystopian or utopia, just looking at a potential positive trajectory that incorporates all of the difficulties, all of the challenges, all of the nuance, which, again, is a systems level perspective. How can we look for more of those, and then also demand more of those from the people who make media that we consume and that write stories that we're trying to understand that look in news analysis that we look at on a daily, regular basis. I think more and more in especially the media landscape, people are calling for less dystopian-focused narratives of potential trajectories of change. And that said, people still love watching dystopian stuff. So how can more of us request, demand that, Ridley Scott, do not just make another dystopian thing. I want to see your take, 'cause he is a great storyteller, even if he doesn't take the science incredibly seriously. So the next time that you consult for him, I hope that you can advocate [0:40:49.0] ____ different perspective.

0:40:50.6 SC: He's a very visual person. That's part of what makes different directors very different. He knew exactly how certain scenes were gonna look long before there was a script for those scenes. The words were less important, but...

0:41:02.9 JH: One of the approaches to that, just as a counterweight, because like you say, every director is different, I worked with Alex McDowell, who's a production designer. He also runs the World Building Institute at USC, he also has a consulting company. Really talented person on so many levels. He's a production designer, and the film that he is the most famous for is Minority Report. And it was really fascinating to get to work with him on his world building process, which he kind of started to develop for that film. And one of the things that was really powerful that he shared about what that process was like, Steven Spielberg hired him, Alex McDowell, the production designer, along with the writer at the same time, so that they developed the story of the film in conjunction with how that world was built. So it happened at the same time that McDowell was basically doing a lot of interviews with different scientific experts to understand the research that might inform... They made Minority Report around 2000, and it was set in a kind of 20, 50-ish timeframe. So whenever you're looking at 50 years from now, it's all science fiction.

0:42:08.2 JH: So he did his best to gather experts together, do these research initiatives and synthesize very different perspectives into a world, and then understand what that world would translate into in terms of this story. So that's to say that there are many different ways of telling stories, there are many different tools for how those stories are constructed. So it's not to say that all science fiction is made equal. It's not to say that all films are made... They're not. How can more of us, I think, become facile with these tools, many of which are adopted in these kinds of media that most of us are influenced by in some capacity, to be more discerning, to be more thoughtful about what we absorb, the ideas about the future that we inherently start to ingest, and then be critical about the ones that we're using in order to inform our ideas about where we might want to go?

0:43:00.4 SC: I like the emphasis on collaboration in the example of Minority Report there. While reading your book, I couldn't help but think of the podcast I did with Jane McGonigal, who does gaming scenarios. And one of the ideas... It's really very simple in retrospect, but no one person has an infinite imagination, and there will be things that other people think of that they didn't. So rather than having one person whose vision takes over everything, let it play out with different people responding in their own individual ways, and you'll discover things that no one person would've thought of.

0:43:36.3 JH: 100%. Yeah. Jane McGonigal is fantastic for lots of reasons. And I think that particular emphasis of hers is a very powerful one, and it's one that I'm particularly interested in, both in my research and also in my professional work. What are tools, processes where we can harness and develop our capacities for collective imagination? Because, yeah, not one person has all the answers. And even if they think they did, they're going to, if we adopt just that one single perspective, a very narrow perspective, they're going to enact impacts that are going to not be advantageous to all people or all non-human systems. So let's be as thorough as we can about exploring the different perspectives that need to influence the different interventions that we make, so that we, ideally, aren't going to enact more adverse impacts over time.

0:44:27.9 JH: We're seeing more and more of that. We are in an interconnected planet. Let's be real about testing out the interconnection of the projects that impacts the interventions that we are proposing, so that we don't create a bigger mess for ourselves than we already have. I think, this is a massive statement, but on a general level, I think that it's true. A lot of the challenges that we are facing today are the result of very narrow, limited thinking and a perspective that what is done in one place will not affect what happens in another place. That's not true. So how do we come up with a way of both exploring and articulating new potential positive interventions, but also collaborating on the actual impacts that those interventions might have?

0:45:17.7 JH: And I think the narrative storytelling space is a powerful one. I think games are a kind of story. So sometimes we wanna have stories that are interactive in real time. I think LARPing, live action roleplay, is something that for a long time was really passed off as something that people who love Dungeons and Dragons do, for big nerds and geeks. What people are finding, and Jane McGonigal is great at advocating for this, is that they're also really amazing ways of exploring very sophisticated concepts, whether healthcare technology or obviously, military strategy or ways of healing from emotional trauma. Games are massively influential in how we communicate with ourselves and other people. And so when it comes to different Speculative Futures tactics, some of them are experiential and incorporate a lot of roleplay, some of them are slightly more narrative, and they encourage a little bit more internal reflection and individual storytelling that then there are opportunities to share it with others.

0:46:18.9 JH: So it's just a way, I think, of understanding that there are many different ways of collaborating with each other and exploring the suite of toolsets that can help us do so, so that given a particular scenario, a particular challenge, a particular project, we can hopefully choose the tools that are going to help us hear each other better and collaborate as a result.

0:46:40.7 SC: And you mentioned this glancingly, but I wanna give you a chance to emphasize this one also. Not only can we aid our imaginations by having different people with different inclinations and skillsets come together, but narrative has the ability to make things visceral and hit home in a way that studies and pie charts don't always. And you have this wonderful example of thinking about life in the city where global warming has just gone completely crazy and everything is flooded, and how much of an impact it has on people in a way that data and statistics just doesn't.

0:47:19.5 JH: Yeah. Yeah, when we think about really scary things, the way that we communicate about them most, and that's obviously a result of the fact that we live in a culture that really prioritizes expertise, we want to present it in a way that seems official and objective. We really prioritized and valued objectivity for a long time. Let's make as rational of a decision about what is occurring as possible. But humans, we're not very rational creatures. We have a lot of emotion, a lot of times when we make a decision.

0:47:47.5 SC: Sometimes. We have moments. [chuckle]

0:47:50.4 JH: I think we see this when we vote for elected officials, we oftentimes vote from a very emotional place. So let's, I think, stop pretending that we can aim for objectivity as some sort of hallowed goal, because one, we don't operate that way, and two, pure objectivity is very hard, if not impossible to achieve. We're all coming with our embedded biases on some level. So as much as data, it can be very helpful, how can we give ourselves the opportunity to engage not just with the practicalities of what new trajectories of climatic change can be, but to really feel into them?

0:48:29.2 JH: I would love to see a world, for example, where all academic institutions or think tanks or NGOs or governance organizations not just do research and have to publish papers, valuable for sure, but also translate that research into experiential interventions or into some sort of narrative form, so that people can really feel what the impacts of two degrees Celsius versus 1.5 versus 3.5 can be like. Help me understand, so that hopefully, we can actually use that information to inform our non-objective thinking. Give me an emotional response so that I can be motivated to hopefully make a change, because when something is not connected or I don't see how it's connected to my personal life, it's really hard for me to care about it. And again, I think that's where systems thinking for a long time has been kind of cordon off, and the purview of people who are academic experts or trained professionals. On a certain level, that's totally true, but I think on a more useful level that I would love to see systems thinking going is for it to basically be the context in which we evaluate potential decisions and also trajectories of change, which means feeling into the impacts of what a particular decision might be, to make, again, the data that influences the choices that we make or gives us an idea of where we may be headed, to make it felt.

0:50:04.1 JH: If we're talking, again, about technological interventions 20 or 30 years in the future, we're obviously seeing whether it's ChatGPT, AI is moving at a very rapid rate. It's going to affect lots of different things. If we're gonna take a system-level perspective with this very powerful technology, let's try and think about the impacts that it has not just on education. I think we've all kind of come to the conclusion that if you can have... If you can type a phrase into ChatGPT, it can give you an essay that's pretty well written, that's going to have a massive implications on how people...

0:50:40.1 SC: Professors are in panic about this. It's hilarious to... This is their first worry about the AI revolution, is that it's gonna be harder to grade people's papers. [chuckle]

0:50:49.0 JH: Or out of a job. Which is true. Some of us definitely won't be as necessary as others, which is also something to really explore in detailed form. What does it mean for the future of work? What does it mean for healthcare? Definitely what does it meaning for decision-making and the ways that we actually come to a certain sort of governance system that hopefully can be equitable over time? Let's look at them in detail. But not just write papers about them and not just have discussions like you and I are having, as much as this is a wonderful one, I don't know that it's going to help people feel into what the implications of these technologies are. Let's really try and make them high-resolution so that we can have, hopefully, a more visceral human-level understanding about what these technologies could make life become, 'cause I think that's really what it comes down to. What does human life, what does daily life, what does my life look like in 30 years when the tools that are already super sophisticated and the algorithms already so mysterious that are shaping things like ChatGPT, what do they become in 20 years, and what does that mean for my life?

0:51:56.6 SC: You've used the word phrase high-resolution a couple times. And I'm pretty sure this is obvious to everyone listening, but you're not talking about the number of pixels on a screen. You're talking about the sort of depth of detail in your scenario that you're speculating about, yeah?

0:52:13.5 JH: Yes. Yeah. When we talk about a low-resolution experience, it might be me saying to you, hey, in 10 years, if we're talking about AI algorithms, they're probably gonna be more sophisticated and they're definitely going to be influencing the way that I communicate with my doctor about my healthcare issues. That's low-resolution. I'm giving you a kind of general description, things that might occur. Yeah, we're having an experience talking about it or at least you're listening to me articulate it, but it's not giving visceral details about what it means for you, Sean. A high-resolution vision is either... And this can, obviously, take many forms. So whether it's a virtual reality scenario of you going to visit your doctor in 10 years with all of the ramifications of how machine learning will be influencing healthcare then, or it's your reading a really detailed science fiction story about maybe your child, if you have children, in 10 years. What their experience of dealing with some sort of disease that might be happening, what that might... Something that really connects to what you care about to your life, whether it's you or someone that you love, and really going through an experience of how a technology is going to affect you.

0:53:26.4 JH: And again, it doesn't have to be a technology. It can be any sort of trigger or change. These drivers of change come in many different forms. Some of them are technological, some of them are social, some of them are economic, some of them are environmental. So let's look at them in context and make them high-resolution, AKA, make them a detailed experience or a narratives or a roleplay game that helps you feel into what those impacts might be.

0:53:52.4 SC: So you've basically given us a toolkit that we can use to think about these Speculative Futures. So I wanna bring it back now to the cities. That's where we wanna make progress here. What does it look like on the ground when you sit down and say, okay, let's do an urban speculative future. Is this something that is a team exercise or are you encouraging people over to do it, is it virtual reality involved, how does it happen?

0:54:20.5 JH: It can be any and all of those things. And I will preface this by saying that, essentially, good Speculative Futures at the present moment in the way that they're used in cities is essentially strong community engagement. I think that that's problematic in that context to really use them in that framework, but that's the reality. The way that cities are made now, oftentimes a funder is coming in or a bond measure has been passed, and so a certain amount of money is allocated for a particular project. Probably people have very strong ideas about what that project is, not so dissimilar to Ridley Scott being like, "I kind of know what the story is, but I'm still gonna ask you to give your opinion on whatever trajectory of change anyways." That's not so dissimilar to what happens in cities. We kind of already know what we wanna do, but we're gonna ask you anyways, 'cause we know we're supposed to. Obviously, there's variations in what that actually looks like. But that is a typical way for projects to move forward.

0:55:15.2 JH: Using Speculative Futures in that context can still be a way of engendering a more robust discussion from the people who are involved. When it's used in a more meaningful way, it's more about co-creation. So, ideally, people who are not experts or who are not funders, but will still be affected by a particular project, will be involved all the way through. And using Speculative Futures in these more creative and iterative ways, 'cause again, Speculative Futures are also a fundamental part of city making. Any architect, any planner is going to use the same tools of virtual reality modeling and world building, etcetera, to create these narratives. So when we use them in their slightly more provocative forms, which is what some of these sci-fi tools are, which is what some of these design fiction objects are, there is a broadening who is invited to respond because not everybody is educated to the level where they're gonna look at a diagram that's in a plan form and be like, "I totally get what that is."

0:56:18.0 JH: Because you need a certain amount of training. It's still a design fiction on a certain level, but it's not one that most people are going to get excited about. So, Speculative Futures are really ways of translating, again, the fundamental process of envisioning what does not exist and articulating ways of making it real, which is what architecture and city planning is all about. And broadening the suite of levels of expertise, so kinds of people who would feel connected to what the communication device is of that potential future, and be able to give their responses, their preferences in return. So when people are invited to basically be collaborators on a design project who are not experts or developers, Speculative Futures can be valuable ways about translating these ideas into forums where a lot of people can give their opinions. And again, that's where the collaboration aspect can really be facilitated in more meaningful ways.

0:57:12.1 JH: So these are... This is why these are not silver bullet tools. They really depend their success, their positive impact on how they're used and to what ends. How is a project being developed from start to finish? Who are the people who are in power, and how are they basically inviting more power sharing into the process? I think where Speculative Futures can also be very valuable is that the more robust our ideas about our preferred trajectories of change as individuals, as communities can be, the more we can advocate for what we want. And so that power sharing can be less of something that people who have that power decide to do and more something that is demanded by those who will be impacted by a potential project.

0:58:00.1 SC: It's interesting, the question of who gets a voice in these things. You make good points in the book about we've had phases of what was called urban renewal with maybe the best of intentions among certain people, but then other people's voices didn't get heard at all. I can imagine that the device of Speculative Futures brings in lots of different voices, but I'm not sure that there's a necessary connection there. Is it just that this is one way to... Well, so what is the connection there, rather than me speculating? Help me out. How do Speculative Futures...

0:58:35.6 JH: The connection... Phrase it one more time, just so I understand what you're trying to...

0:58:39.1 SC: How does the idea of Speculative Futures as a way of thinking about design and city planning help bring in multiple voices, multiple stakeholders to the process?

0:58:48.9 JH: I think on a fundamental level, it is about acknowledging the fact that many of us, just on a base level, have limited imagination about what can happen. So just to begin with, let's be more creative. Let's challenge our embedded ways of thinking about what's possible. So, base level. When it comes to enhancing more collaborative forms of articulating preferred trajectories of change, I think the narrative spaces that Speculative Futures tools give us are areas where there's... Again, by using that possibility space that the future provides and rendering the details of what that possibility space could turn into in terms of human impact of those potential trajectories that we're debating, the narrative space can be a way of giving us a little bit of distance so that our... The impacts that they would enact on us as individuals maybe feel, often can feel less fraught, so that we can debate more effectively in the possibility space of this potential future trajectory. Whether it's five or 10 years, again, change can happen during that time. So let's not get totally embedded within the challenges, the mistrust, the inequities of the present moment and just give ourselves that space of potential future to, again, debate...

1:00:09.1 JH: There's a lot of trust that can be built if it's facilitated that process in a thoughtful and effective way. When we build that trust between people who are coming from different backgrounds, and sometimes it does take a long period of time, there can be a better, more effective meaningful form of collaboration, again, on preferred trajectories. And once we identify a preferred trajectory that many different people can hopefully agree with, that's where we can start to move back to the present moment and identify, okay, if that's something that we can agree upon, what are different ways of getting there? And again, there might still be disagreement, but at least there's a commonly held vision about where spaces could go.

1:00:50.1 JH: And this again, is something that people in different communities do all the time. But we don't necessarily have a lot of common language, common tools, supported spaces in which to do this stuff together. So these are tools, again, since we are natural storytelling creatures, you can argue that the two oldest technologies in humanity are fire and stories. Stories are what encourage us to do and engage in collective actions that are quite sophisticated. We've been doing this for a long time. How can we harness that very longstanding, ancient human technique to hopefully organize ourselves more effectively towards the trajectories towards which we want to go? The way to do that, in order to affect more equitable trajectories of change, is for more of us to be part of that together. That requires power sharing, that requires co-production.

1:01:43.4 JH: The narrative space is not always used for that. But if more of us can collaborate on what those stories are, and again, sometimes that happens via game play, sometimes that happens via writing stories together, if we think about... We're in the United States, very influenced by Western European culture. People argue that the Odyssey, other epics by Homer, they weren't just written by one person. It was probably a lot of different people taking those stories and iterating on, refining them over time. Speculative Futures are tools. We might not come up with an epic like the Odyssey, but we might come up with a different vision, a trajectory of change that tells us information about where we wanna go. And ideally, that vision is iterated and refined over time. Again, I think the whole concept of protopia, of up-topia is something that Speculative Futures can help with when it's really an iterative process.

1:02:36.9 JH: We might have something that we agree upon at a certain scale of society for a certain period, but our demographics change, issues change, economic factors change, things change. So how can that vision be something that's iterated upon over time? So whether Speculative Futures are something that's held by a local government and people convene on a bi-yearly basis, or it's something that happens within an organization, that's kinda what we do when we create five-year plans, right? We're refining those things over time. So can we do that on a societal level? Who are we? What do we care about? Where do we wanna go? And then translate that, hopefully, into action. But to do it on a repeated basis. And I think one of the challenges in the ways that cities have been managed for so long, and largely today, they're so underfunded, so understaffed, there's just not a lot of resources that are there. How do we engender cities to, hopefully, have the resources that are required to facilitate this kind of work, again, on an ongoing basis, so that they can really serve the needs of the many different people who are living there now and will be in years to come?

1:03:47.7 SC: I think that that's very helpful for me, because if I can try to sort of rephrase the central point from my perspective, and tell me if I got it right or not, of course you can do Speculative Futures as a heroic individual. You don't have to talk to anyone at all to imagine, to write a science fiction story. But maybe the point is that if you are already committed to the idea that different groups of people should have a voice in imagining the society, especially 'cause we all have different imaginations, we all have different interests, etcetera, this toolkit of Speculative Futures provides a way to do that that is especially effective.

1:04:24.3 JH: Yeah. I think that's a wonderful way of saying it. And things that I would add are that this toolkit is also a way for us to, for sure, collaborate with each other, but also demand the kinds of moves, trajectories of change, investment strategies that we want. Because when we have a much clearer idea about where we would prefer to go, we have the motivation, oftentimes, to really try and make those changes happen, which doesn't mean that we have to become antagonistic with other people, but it does mean that we oftentimes have a lot more energy to make things happen. That said, we live in a bureaucratic society that makes it very difficult to really harness that energy into implementable action. So, again, this is not to say that if we as a society become more facile with Speculative Futures, everything will suddenly change for the better. Just the fact that in order to figure out how to change my healthcare plan takes me, it feels like, a week or more in order to do...

1:05:26.8 SC: Oh my God. Don't tell me. Don't talk...

1:05:27.7 JH: There's this time suck that is embedded in the way our society is organized.

1:05:29.5 SC: Terrible, terrible experiences. Yeah.

1:05:33.4 JH: But still, in order to make these potential futures realities, we do have to be energized. We have to care. When I was 18, I spent a year working on a boat in Polynesia doing coral reef research. And one of the islands that I spent time at, the island nation of Tuvalu, this was around 2004, they were already experiencing very drastic degrees of sea level rise. And so they were very motivated, for tragic reasons, to figure out their emigration plans. A lot of them were going to move to New Zealand, other island countries that still were going to be safer when it came to increasing degrees of sea level rise and climatic change. They were motivated, because climate change was deeply personal. This was around 20 years ago. So, obviously, things have changed since then, and more of us are feeling the impacts of climatic change. But I think that's really to the point of when we feel personally connected to these seemingly abstract concepts or very complex systems or new technological, mysterious interventions, it's hard to understand a lot of times how they're personal.

1:06:34.6 JH: So Speculative Futures, they're ways of making the abstract potential trajectories of change personal, motivating us to do something about it. And with that motivation can come real openings for collaborating, discussing with others. And the tools are good for feeling the personal impacts, and then also for communicating what our preferred response trajectories are with other people. So it's kind of the tool, dual-pronged approach. Let me feel first what this means for me, come up with, hopefully, some ideas for what I might wanna do in response, and then talk about it with other people.

1:07:07.9 SC: So after all of these nice words, inspirational thoughts about collaboration and bringing in different voices, I'm gonna violate all of that and close by asking you to give us your personal vision of the perfect future city. What do you want to see cities doing that they don't do now?

1:07:29.5 JH: Wow. Put me on the spot here.

1:07:30.5 SC: Yeah. That's why... [chuckle] It's the end of the podcast. We let our hair down. No one's gonna hold you to too high a standard. Let your imagination roam.

1:07:36.0 JH: So for me, if I'm thinking of an ideal city, it's also what I think of as a slightly more realistic city. So I'm envisioning a city of at least 20 million people, much bigger, a bigger city.

1:07:48.5 SC: Oh my goodness. Yeah.

1:07:49.6 JH: And so on a governmental level, I think this is a city where people have space for imaginative co-creation to occur on an ongoing basis. Again, this is something that's kind of like jury duty. We're just doing it 'cause we live in this place together, we are using these Speculative Futures tools to translate visions, action steps, identified through these co-creation processes into planning initiatives, policy recommendations, infrastructural interventions, so that the city, at this quite large level, is able to iterate between strategic implementation opportunities with the visions that are co-created on an ongoing basis. I think of NGOs, civil society acting as mediators, maybe, in some of these processes, mostly by taking the research that they develop and translating them into experiential, narrative speculative forms that people can engage with. So there's a certain level of legibility that our society has that is not dependent on people getting a PhD or some degree. It's just because they're translated in forms that more of us understand, I.e., narratives, I.e., some of these Speculative Futures forums.

1:08:58.7 JH: I think of the business in the private sector focusing on funding, literacy in these different sorts of interventions. What if a very wealthy and problematic company like Meta is really funding civic engagement with complex research-based initiatives that are just in civic public space. So it's not about even having a headset or a particular kind of technological tool, but they're projected in some sort of publicly available way for all people to engage with in order to learn about some of the issues that are facing their particular area over time. And as individuals, I think about us hopefully becoming more engaged with exploring the role of future trajectories of change in our own lives. What does that look like as both an individual practice, and maybe also as a relational practice? How do people talk if they have kids about what their lives might be like in 20, 30 years? Kids are amazing, and just imagining whole alternative trajectories. How can we really invite people who are younger to be a part of these conversations? Again, not in ways where we're talking down to them, but really appreciative about their imaginative capacity is at a whole other level. How can we support those imaginative capacities to really be embedded not just in these larger visioning processes, but also on an individual level, how we're thinking about these trajectories of change?

1:10:21.8 JH: So I have lots of ideas also on the infrastructural interventions and the different sorts of ways that technological tools could improve these future cities. And not that I don't think that those are important to voice, but I think what's much more important to voice, what we spend a lot less time focused on, is how we come to these decisions together. And I think that that particular process of different scales of society, different sectors of society being engaged in this work of envisioning alternative trajectories of change that they would prefer is essential to creating the more equitable spaces. The infrastructural interventions, the way that we are embracing different technological tools, essential, but what is even more essential is how we have those discussions together.

1:11:05.5 SC: You've given us a lot to think about, most of which is how very, very complicated this whole topic is. I presume that you yourself think that this is something you'll never completely wrap your head around all the different aspects of what goes into this. This is the maybe, I don't know whether neuroscience or city planning is the better example of something where there's just so much complexity that we nibble at the edges, and it can seem very intimidating to us.

1:11:32.4 JH: For sure. And also, as much as it is complex and I'm never going to fully understand it, nor will, I think, any other individual, I do think it's also quite fun.

1:11:41.7 SC: Oh yeah. [chuckle]

1:11:42.7 JH: And I think that is an undervalued attribute. It's fascinating, and it can also be really, yeah, exciting and fun. And I think that that's a valuable thing that Speculative Futures tools provide, which, arguably, city making needs more of. Let's make it fun, so we actually wanna do it with each other.

1:12:04.6 SC: Exciting and fun and important. So, Johanna Hoffman, thanks very much for being on the Mindscape podcast.

1:12:09.6 JH: Thanks, Sean. It was such a pleasure.

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