In July this year, Varsha, a member of the DLGS 2022-25 cohort secured a wonderful opportunity to participate in the Sustainable futures summer school organised by the Urban Futures studio at the Utrecht University, Netherlands.
Sai Varsha Akavarapu at the Sustainable Futures: Politics, Democracy and Futuring Summer School
Sai Varsha Akavarapu at the Sustainable Futures: Politics, Democracy and Futuring Summer School
In July this year, Varsha, a member of the DLGS 2022-25 cohort secured a wonderful opportunity to participate in the Sustainable futures summer school organised by the Urban Futures studio at the Utrecht University, Netherlands.
The past and the present have a profound impact on how the future is envisioned and the futures imaginaries envisioned, in turn heavily influence the present. With the world today pledging to safeguard a liveable future by adopting sustainable, just and democratic pathways, the week long summer school deliberated multiple questions surrounding the techniques utilised towards futuring across the planet.
With Varsha’s research focusing on deciphering the impact of institutional (co-futuring) capacities (existence or lack-thereof) on spatial transformations, the summer school provided her with a unique platform to address how techniques of futuring can be used to unpack actions taken by governance structures to design sustainable futures imaginaries. In a society where people, groups, communities, systems and institutions are continuously futuring and simultaneously shaping the present, it becomes imperative and yet challenging to craft futures that are just, desirable and democratic to circumvent dystopian futures imaginaries. And as such, what does it take to democratise futuring? What visions already exist and how are world governments engaging with such visions? How can citizen-knowledge be leveraged to increase the action potential of existing visions? What institutional capacities are crucial to tap into the potential that citizen-knowledge offers? Do subjective perspectives of ‘those who plan’ impact how democratised futuring is navigated in the spatial sphere? If yes, how? are some of the questions that the summer school addressed with future ‘futurists’ who actively contributed to some of the most engaging discussions on the challenging nature of futuring. The summer school, apart from broadening the horizon of knowledge by opening up the participants’ views to the existence of multiple aspirational, fictional, just and yet highly un-just futures, grounded it’s participants in the everyday political realities and struggles that surround futures imaginaries across the world, especially in the Global North vs Global South.
