„Future of the Futures of the Cities“
Breathe Earth Collective @ Bilbao Design Week 2019
© Karlheinz Boiger

The complex and demanding challenges and changes in our society such as climate change, urbanization, economic crises, migration, etc. call for new innovative and forward-looking approaches and strategies for the future. Imagining the future by questioning preconceived ideas and opinions and discussing different scenarios, we can creatively test and explore new ideas: speculation enables us to go beyond polarised debates about “good” or “bad” and to express opinions which are neither so obvious nor so media-influenced by the conflicts and factors of the present- with a constructive and forward-looking tone.

The workshop “Future of the Futures of the Cities” within the framework of the Bilbao Design Week 2019 (BBDW19) aims to discuss the futures of the city with speakers and participants, experts from architecture and urban planning, futurologists and politics. In speculative design, interdisciplinary working groups develop a multitude of speculative future scenarios, which could subsequently serve as approaches for design-, planning and decision-making processes. The different future scenarios of Bilbao will be presented at the opening event of Design Week. Members of the working groups are Ane Abarrategi (TIPI, Bilbao, ES), Elisabet Roselló (postfuturear, Barcelona, ES), Frances Brown from Dundee (Scotland, UK) and architect Karlheinz Boiger, “Breathe Earth Collective” and “Hohensinn Architektur” from Graz (AT), who are invited from The Creative Cities Network to contribute to the design of the workshop and the future scenarios.