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Keri Facer (00:01)
So, hello everybody and welcome back. Today we're going to be talking about how ideas of the future shape our sense of possibility in the present. We're going to be thinking about the way that time lives in the imagination and in particular we're going to think about the way that the temporal imagination structures the stories we tell about how the world might change and what role we can play in that change. So, this question of how our ideas of the future shape our thinking in the present isn't in itself a new question. Utopian thinking has had a long and complicated history. It's been a source for powerful transformation and for huge violence. The field of future studies that I've been involved with for years as well dates back at least 60 years to the effort to create collective and ethical responses to the Second World War. But today we're going to come at futures from a different direction. We thought it would be wonderful to invite two brilliant scholars and researchers who I don't think would necessarily define themselves as futurists, but who are nonetheless working very creatively with futures, in particular as they relate to how we might imagine and create future cities that are good for people and planet. I'm very pleased to have here our first guest, an old friend of mine and colleague, ⁓ Johannes Stripple from Lunds University. Hi Johannes. Johannes is a political scientist with a central focus on the governance of climate change and he's led some of the most interesting projects in recent years, exploring how fictional stories of the future might help us narrate a transition to a post fossil fuel society. In particular, he leads the fantastic Climagenaries project, which brought us amongst other things, a tourist guide to the fictional future city of Notterdam and he's also led the Museum of Carbon Ruins, which is a wonderful interactive exhibit that invites visitors to narrate how we left behind the fossil era. It's a museum that's set in the future. I'm also delighted that we have joining us Daniel Barber. Daniel is a historian of architecture and environment and professor at Eindhoven University of Technology. And Daniel's research looks at how architects have engaged with questions of climate over the last century and is particularly concerned with how historical knowledge can inform how we design, build and live in houses today and in the future. Daniel's book, Modern Architecture and Climate: Design Before Air Conditioning, points us to the way that thinking with the past can open up pathways to radical rethinking of the future. And we'll be focusing today in particular on his work After Comfort, which does a fascinating job of showing how our assumptions and fears about bodily comfort both shape and shut down the possibility of redesigning cities. So, welcome, Johannes, and welcome, Daniel. I'd like to start just by asking you both to tell us a little bit about how you got into working in areas that seem a little bit from the, at least from the outside, to be very innovative in relation to your home disciplines and fields. So Daniel, perhaps you could start. How do you become a historian of architecture who ends up writing about the future?
Daniel Barber (03:15)
Yeah, fabulous. Thank you. And thanks for this opportunity for such a compelling discussion. Yeah, to think about, in effect, the question on the table is a really potent one, right? How do we understand the history of architecture, the history of cities, the history of interiors in the context of their possible futures? uildings are strange historical objects insofar as many of them persist through time, over time, resist historicization even in terms of the ways that they interact with their societies and environments, right? So, really understanding buildings as a sort of living presence in our social world, right, is part of how I like to think about this sort of ongoing relationship that we develop to our buildings, right? This way we kind of live with them and encounter them and how buildings dream, right? And the kind of internal life of what buildings aspire to, right? And again, precisely on what time scale, right? I mean, sort of when do these changes emerge? Yeah, so, in a sense as a historian, I began to look really carefully at in effect, how we're sort of managing our interior experience, right? Our sort of ways of living and what others refer to as the thermal environment, The kind of thermal conditions that we operate in, which is to say the heat and the cold and certainly the humidity and the movement of air and other sorts of aspects of our experience. A space that I've come to call the planetary interior, right? So, in that sense, the kind of scalar questions as well of these kind of small spaces that we inhabit, but that aggregate, right? As you kind of imagine the millions of these small spaces around the world and the HVAC systems that might be feeding air into these spaces or heating up the perimeter walls or whatever might be in effect in a given season, right? So, this sort of multi-scalar question about, you know, similar to the kind of temporal one playing out the the relationship to past and future as well as this kind of sense of the scalar shift of a small interior space that has a resonance across a broad planetary system.
Keri Facer (05:19)
I love this idea of the planetary interior. I wonder what that does for our future imaginary. If we're thinking about the imaginary of the interior, the smaller space, as opposed to a future imaginary. It's often at a massive scale, isn't it? It's always, how do we reimagine the world? Thanks, Daniel. So, Johannes, how does a political scientist become somebody who ends up collaborating with science fiction writers and why?
Johannes Stripple (05:42)
Yeah, one might wonder. I suppose the shift began when I started to question a basic idea in political science, that the difficulties of moving to a post fossil society are mainly about a lack of interest or political will. But over time, I came to see it differently. Maybe it's not just about motivation or information, but about imagination a failure to conceive of the world otherwise. And I think my background in critical political thought was actually the gateway. It's a tradition that teaches us to diagnose the present, to destabilize what we take for granted, and to denaturalize the things we often think of as normal or inevitable. It's about making the familiar strange. So, once you start doing that, the step into speculation doesn't feel so far. The distance between Foucault and fiction is, I think, shorter than many people realize. Both are concerned with how worlds are made and how they might be made differently. So for me, working with speculative fiction, wasn't a detour from political science, but a continuation of that same critical impulse to diagnose the present in order to make room for alternative futures.
Keri Facer (07:08)
That was fascinating. And I think this idea of how worlds are made and how they might be made differently is at the heart of both of your work. I mean, Johannes, maybe I know that you've been working with speculative fiction writers a little. Can you just tell me something about what you get out of that personally?
Johannes Stripple (07:26)
When I work with speculative fiction writer, I'm mostly involved in working out the world building together with them. But then I'm useless at narrating the stories set in that world, the dialogues, or that sort of that, what the author is really good at. So the collaboration starts with designing and thinking about the assumptions of the world in which the stories are set. But then I often hand over the action narrating to the ones who knows it better. I mean, there's a specific quality of being an author doing that. And then we discuss the world and the implication that has for the world. So, it's really not a back and forth between the world building and setting the stories within that world.
Keri Facer (07:58)
It feels to me there's something about architecture in that. There is something about the architecture of the imagination. Daniel, do you think architects are particularly well placed to do the imagination of the future, or are they perhaps the people who really shouldn't be doing this sort of work? Where's your positioning on that?
Daniel Barber (08:25)
I mean, on some level architecture is always speculation, right? So, there's that sort of skill and kind of aptitude or attitude in some sense kind of built in, but yeah, some might be more creative with it than others, right? And there's architects and artists and policymakers and theorists and all sorts of people of course operating in these ways. But I was thinking as well about, the way that you were describing a process, that's also this kind of iterative process of design, right? And that's something quite familiar to the field and the sort of ways that we ask questions and try to understand, you know, the kind of resonance and, you know, different layers of kind of thinking through a given project and sort of bringing in other sorts of discussions in precisely the way, that back and forth and reviewing and playing around and trying things out. So, I think even being really thoughtful about the sort of creative processes and practices that we're trying to do together to imagine these different futures is, I guess, kind of back to Foucault, the conduct of our conduct.
Keri Facer (09:08)
That sense of iteration to me is actually an interesting topic for us to maybe drill down to a little bit more later on, which is that, you know, too often we have this idea of the future, the image of the future is something that's done, it gets constructed, but actually we've got this constant relationship between the image of the future and the action in the present and this ongoing iterative practice in anticipation You know, we're constantly operating with this model of the future that is being tested against reality. So, Johannes, I've known your work for many years. Maybe you could talk us through the rough guide to Notterdam in particular. What is that and what were you trying to achieve with this?
Johannes Stripple (10:07)
Thanks a lot. So, Rough Guide to Notterdam really began as an experiment in imagining climate transition as a lived, cultural and contested process, not just a technical shift. So, it takes the form of a fictional travel guide to a post fossil city in the 2050s, Notterdam. But unlike a blueprint or a utopian master plan, it's full of friction, contradiction and open question. And we designed the guide as a collaborative process. There were researchers, artists, students, and citizens all contributed to building this fictional city. So, we created a space where people could explore what the end of the fossil era might feel like, not from the perspective of state or industry, but from everyday life. What jobs exists? What memories remain? Where do you eat? What new rituals or struggles emerge in society after fossil fuels? I draw on the work of Ernst Bloch and Ruth Levitas, both of whom insist that utopia isn't about perfection, it's about potential. Bloch talks about the not yet conscious, glimpses of future possibility embedded in the present. He sees hope as something concrete and active, rooted in struggle and longing. And that was really key for us, treating the city of Notterdam, not as a dreamland, but as a site of hopeful experimentation with real tensions. Levitas, in turn, reframed utopia as a method, a way of diagnosing the present by constructing alternative. She asked not just what might a better world look like, but what would need to change for it to come into being and who benefits from things staying the same. And that diagnostic function of utopia was very present in our process. Through Notterdam, we were able to stage dilemmas around justice, memory, repair, belonging that are deeply embedded in climate transitions, but they often get smoothed over in policy or those techno futures scenarios. So, for us through Notterdam, critical utopia is not a perfect end state. It's more like an invitation to imagine otherwise and to inhabit the transition to rehearse futures that are open, political and unfinished.
Keri Facer (12:30)
Thanks, Johannes. That's a wonderful introduction to the kind of core concepts of critical utopianism and Ruth Levitas's work is absolutely central here. She's done a great job of taking the kind of three-volume complexity of Ernst Bloch's work and turning it into something that we can work with. In this fictional city of yours, you've got lots of articles and lots of examples and I remember seeing an image of a kind of giant rubber duck sculpture floating in the city park. Can you give me an example of just like one of the things that one encounters when one's wandering through this Notterdam. Can you talk me through an example of one of the...
Johannes Stripple (13:09)
Sure. That sculpture you're talking about, was a sculpture that was People came to the city and they want to get rid of their plastic toys and plastic stuff. So, they start to put it in the pile. And over time, that became a large statue... was formalized as it became a landmark, not by design from the beginning, but by people trying to get rid of their plastic stuff. It became a landmark of the city.
Keri Facer (13:35)
Yeah, and what I really enjoy about Notterdam is precisely this sort of imperfection, the messy complicated nature of the futures that we'll be living in in the same way as we're living them in today. Michel, do you want to say something?
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (13:50)
I was wondering, Johannes, you mentioned the role of utopias as a way to reveal tensions in the present. And, so, I was wondering what kind of struggles ⁓ were experienced in this city and what kind of tensions emerge from what you've built with the people involved in terms of the description of the life in this city.
Johannes Stripple (14:14)
I mean, there are plenty of struggles in the city between who owns things and around justice and around transport. we asked people to imagine very small bits of it. Like what's on the menu here or how do you get to there or where do you buy meat in the city? So, people started with very small bits. And, of course that creates a bit of a messiness to it all. there are sort of small utopias, small dystopias within this whole what people are not finding or where they want to go. But we also state some more clear conflict. There is a stranded large oil tanker in the harbor and there is like a tribe who has occupied it and they have the last gallons of diesel and oil to sell. what do you do with that last bits of oil? What do you drive and what do you power with it when it becomes the luxury commodity?
Keri Facer (15:13)
Yeah. I love these fictional worlds as spaces for really interrogating these questions about value and priority. Thanks, Johannes. Daniel, your work, related and very different. You've got a brilliant paper, After Comfort, that's hit a really important nerve around the world. It's been translated into four or five languages. Perhaps you could lay out the arguments in that paper for us, and particularly this question about how the idea of bodily comfort. which I find fascinating because most utopian work, operates as though the future is only in the imagination or in the material world, but you're bringing in this concept of bodily comfort. So, how does this idea of bodily comfort shape the possibility of these futures and influence where we might be able to work in the present?
Daniel Barber (16:06)
Yeah, I mean, I've tried to really zoom in on this question of comfort. And in a sense, you know, the more you zoom in to something like this, the more it just sort of takes over But, you know, basically the after comfort piece tried to set out two kind of principles. I mean, one is that, you know, when we're talking about comfort, which is to say when we're talking about the way that we feel in a built environment and a built interior and, depending on where one lives in the season, that might be with the window open and the breeze blowing, or that might be everything sealed and the heater on, or with the air conditioner running, right? How that experience of comfort is produced has very significant sort of resonance across carbon emissions and planetary destabilization, right? And also is again, sort of mediated, Or is sort of mitigated potentially through the built environment, So, this sense by which we're sort of operating within these systems that we've produced to relate ourselves to buildings with windows and walls and heating and cooling systems, not to mention plumbing and all sorts of other things, right? But yeah, we sort of have developed a relationship to these systems to buildings that is very fossil fuel intensive, And which is to say even in a building where we're passively cooling ourselves by opening and closing windows, we're still often using materials that are very heavy with embodied energy or in some other way using energy to sort of manage those comfort needs, right? So, the first point of the essay is that that sort of sense of comfort, right? Sort of how you feel inside is contingent, is variable and is sort of manipulable, behaviorable, changeable, practicable, sort of habitual, right? and one can change those habits and collectively we can sort of reimagine those habits and those practices, right. So that's sort of one thing to keep in mind is this question of thermal practices and, sort of how can we get better at living inside, right? How can we draw the curtains at just the right moment? Right? to sort of maximize the heat during the day, but insulate it so it stays inside all night, right? I mean, you know, how do we sort of establish our routines and our relationships to our buildings and our ways of life and the sun outside and the rain that may or may not fall, right? And sort of become a part of this system in a collaborative way. The second important framework of the essay, I think, was that this question of comfort is ⁓ a sort of medium for inequity, right? I mean, that when we're thinking about climate justice, you know, the question of climate instability and the sort of transformation of the biosphere and its effects, we're sort of immediately talking about inequitable relationship to these thermal access, to these thermal environments. And this very complicated set of feedback loops that emerge, right, which to put it kind of simply is a condition where those with means hiding in their towers quite literally sealed up, you know, fossil fueled, air conditioning and heating and, the rest of us kind of suffering in the waste heat, you know, down below. And of course, you know, how vast the scales of those inequities and sort of how we sort of manage those inequities is much of the challenge of the present moment. Who gets to be comfortable and who gets to kind of experience this, you know, universal stabilized thermal environment where kind of anything can happen, right? And who's sort of managing the vagaries of heat or cold temperatures and sort of, you know, living in a different sort of condition?
Keri Facer (19:25)
Reading your work really disrupted you know, my sense of how we begin to anticipate futures and to think into that space. So, this sense of this inherited understanding of comfort, and the way in which you talk about that, effectively, what we see is projected into the future in the design of buildings, a sense of entitlement to a particular sort of bodily comfort, which is such an astonishing privilege and feels very specific to a particular historical moment in time. I mean, is there not something particularly distinctive about this last century that we even began to believe that we could control our environment in that way? I mean, is there something just strangely anomalous about this moment that we're projecting forwards a particular sense of bodily comfort?
Daniel Barber (19:55)
Yeah. Well, I think it's part of the challenging aspect of comfort studies, let's call them, right? of, I mean, dare I say, kind of existential aspect, right? I mean, on the one hand, as you're suggesting, right, the recognition that we have fossil fueled ourselves and our sort of ways of life and our aspirations, you know, our fossil fuelled, right? Our sort of dreams and ways of being in the world. And, you know, on the one hand, we can play that out in terms of kind of a Haitian vacations in, you know, the tropical islands and all the fuel we're burning to kind of keep ourselves happy, right? But also just coming home and, you know, closing the door and sitting down and, you know, enjoying a dinner with my family also has a carbon condition associated with it and how I sort of operate and sort of maneuver and reimagine those conditions, you know. there's a kind of challenge here of, we're either going to change this by thinking differently about how we live in these spaces and sort of operate together or, you know, we're going to be forced to, well, both probably, right, kind of forced to really reimagine our practices and habits because of the transformations, destabilizations of the world outside, right?
Keri Facer (21:18)
It feels to me that both of your areas of work are in some way trying to trouble or disrupt inherited habits of dreaming, inherited sets of aspirations and assumptions and desires for the future. This is in some ways deep psychoanalytic work as much as anything else. I mean, you're trying to get into the deep code of what it is we long for. I mean, how does your work relate to this issue about longings?
Johannes Stripple (21:45)
In general, I think longing is a feeling. The main point is that feelings matter a great deal. It's one of the major misconceptions about future oriented work, if you come from planning or policy, where you think that it's purely rational or technical. But the future isn't just a matter of data and projections, it's deeply emotional. So, it's about hope and fear, loss and longing, anxiety and attachment. So, I think in my work on future cities, like in Carbon Ruins or Notterdam, you can see how emotions shape what people can or cannot imagine. Some futures feel closed off because they are too painful. Others feel exciting, but unrealistic. So, that emotional texture is part of what governs our sense of what's possible. So, over my work, I've been really inspired by Stuart Candy's and his insistence that we need to move beyond a politics of the obvious and create spaces where the world can be seen and felt otherwise is really important. So, in Notterdam, we tried to do exactly that. You take people on a journey into a post fossil city, not to show a perfect future, but to invite them into contradictions, rhythms, tensions. And then people return from that journey. They often carry new insights, not just intellectually, emotionally.
Keri Facer (23:17)
To me, some of this feels absolutely critical. I remember David Orr, who's the brilliant environmental educator, and he talks about the difference between hope and wishful thinking and being able to distinguish between these two things. Maria Ojala is also a fabulous psychologist of climate change. She talks about the importance of critical hope. It's an interrogated hope... what does this really give us this particular vision or longing or dream? What about you, Daniel, how does this connect to you?
Daniel Barber (23:49)
I think one place that it comes through a lot is frankly in teaching. And insofar as I sort of run a chair that's thinking about histories of architecture and engaging a professionally focused, technologically focused crowd of students in this regard. And it's really about trying to suggest, that architects will no longer be building buildings, right? But rather renovating and retrofitting and thinking about decarbonization and sort of tactics in the city and social practices, right, that can help us to not only reimagine, but yes, sort of build a different kind of relationship to carbon in effect, right? To build a different relationship to resources as a society. And, so, there's this aspect that can get quite grandiose, of architects and buildings really kind of mediating these conditions, right? And really becoming this kind of material substrate that has a metabolism and the design of the built environment is this way to just sort of dial down carbon intensity. But it's a very different set of aspirations than most architecture students have come to their studies to pursue, right? Shifting these aspirations and sort of talking about possible futures and working with them in their design critiques to kind of imagine what sort of worlds they're conceptualizing, right? We were talking a minute ago about kind of, you know, what do we do with the oil that's left? Right? I mean, certainly not kind of make sure that we've, you know, most elegantly clad the latest whatever but, you know, manage a hospital or a sick ward. I mean, that's what we need to do with the carbon, right? And, you know, where do architects kind of reposition their interface with society around, you know, the kind of urgency of those questions? ⁓ Which kind of leads me to the second, you know, framework around this issue of sort of aspiration and longing. I've gotten really focused on, what buildings want, right? Or sort of how we can think about buildings as kind of more than human species with strong relationships to our social beings and our bodily conditions and how do we sort of dream with them together to sort of produce a world in which we can all have a future, the building and the individuals that inhabit it. was recently in a residency at a foundation in the southwest of France where they were replacing their windows, right? So, you know, they'd renovated this building and this big project had occurred and they discovered that the way that the windows had been replaced had had some issues. Redressing these kind of thermal flaws and sort of re-imagining this whole analysis that comes into, you know, why it's cost effective to replace the windows, even though, this sort of whole cycle, really recognizing that buildings sort of breathe and they have a daytime. they have a nighttime, right? You turn things off, doors lock, systems shut off. And, so I was taking these 24 hour time-lapse photographs, sort of watching the building's windows slowly be transformed. And really almost kind of imagining having this access to the building at night in that sense, kind of visually in this sort of. What does it want to do? How do we want to live differently with these? Because part of this challenge with comfort is that our building stock is built for a fossil-fueled world. If I were to remove all HVAC heating and cooling systems from many buildings, the wallboard would start to mold and the floors would eventually warp. We're locked in. We're stuck in this condition. So, really trying to understand how we can sort of work with this kind of material substrate that we've developed over the past century that has been again, a kind of grandiosity, been a kind of celebration of what fossil fuels can bring in terms of a sort of sealed thermal life, right? And how we can, yeah, dream with our buildings in a different way, yeah, of a different future.
Keri Facer (27:22)
You've repopulated my sense of the future there with cities as beings now. This is something I'm going to be sitting with. Johannes, you wanted to say something?
Daniel Barber (27:43)
Yeah, yeah.
Johannes Stripple (27:47)
Yeah, just the question of longing is often really playful. if you start to imagine the world in 2050. And of course, people will long for the things that they had during the fossil era. That's often very playful exercise. So, in one of the project, we imagined a small village in the region of Skåne. The village is called Vanville. So, it's a village that started with people having, you know, large vans, whether you drive around and you sleep in them. And, of course they were fossil fueled. So, at some point in time, they couldn't drive them anymore. And they started to park there and more and more people parked in there. So, the Vanville community grew and grew over time. in Vanville, they couldn't drive their vans as they used to do, but they had some hidden and saved gasoline. Once in a year or so they go on their secret drives with their old fossil vans and then they come back to their village. So they still have their sort of community spirit of van life and living in vanville. So they are happy with where they are, but now and then they are also happy to sort of imagine how it once was as well.
Keri Facer (28:56)
Now this makes me think of the role of ritual in transitions, in making a change. So what you've given us there is an image of people dealing with loss in some ways, of letting go a certain way of being in the world. it takes me to this kind of playful question of what rituals we might need to allow us to hold the transitions of these multi-species relationships that we've got going on here with our cars and with our buildings and with our air conditioning systems, and what sorts of practices we might need annually as a memorial perhaps for things that we used to love and have learned to let go. I wonder whether part of our transition process is we're dealing with the emotions and the effects of this... is this construction of new ritual practices that allows to let some stuff go and allow new things to arise? Okay. I'll go off and think about that. yeah.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (29:53)
I may just step in, maybe. Keri, What you just said made me feel associated to the work of a colleague Gaston Pineau who worked on a relation with the environment from a very basic anthropological perspective, a relation to air, relation to fire, relation to water and to land. And, so with this basic assumption that throughout our life, we learn to relate to the elements that constitute the environment we are living in. And, so, listening to both of you, Daniel and Johannes, I was reminded that the built environment we are living in has his own life, and mediate our relation to the element. It protects us, it exposed us also. Daniel was saying we also have to adjust to the constraints of the built environment. And, so, I was wondering, in your research and in your practice, how do you see people unlearning the way they used to live with their everyday built environment? And that connects also to another question I had before that also relate to what both of you were mentioning about the connection between the everyday life with aspiration and representation of the future. How do we understand this connection between what we do here and now and how it affects what may happen next?
Daniel Barber (31:17)
Yeah, I could jump in on a few things there. Thanks for that, Michel. I think a couple of really interesting things have come up. I mean, I think on the one hand, this question around almost kind of expectation and desire, know, sort of what are we unlearning, right? Are we unlearning what we aspire to? Are we trying to kind of inculcate a different set of dreams about the future, but also sort of what have we kind of accepted to be normal and kind of expect as a kind of baseline, right? Th funny thing with comfort is often those expectations are not even healthy, right? They're not even the kind of right expectations, so to speak, right? We want quite a dramatic diversity of thermal experiences to keep our bodies. Well, it gets complicated, but that's the basic idea. I do exercise with my students where they map their thermal practices and where they're living. In many cases, those that are living at home, maybe in a multi-generational family, my grandmother used to spend the time in the sunroom back in the old country, but now she just has to sit next to the stove or, I mean, just kind of how people used to occupy spaces differently and how we can begin to see those as opportunities for retraining. There's a kind of science to this, let's say, of sort of changing the set points of the HVAC system seeing how much, where people feel comfortable, how much they can handle. But one of the frameworks for thermal comfort, that emerges again from a kind of architecture science discussion is that of adaptive comfort, right? Which is basically that different people have different comfort needs and rather than cooling or heating a space, we should focus on the person and allow for those different needs to sort of be expressed through these systems and, you know, radiative elements or whatever the components might be. And the adaptive comfort ⁓ discourse has this great sort of framework of what is referred to as the adaptive opportunity, which is to say how to kind of design in a moment that helps the user understand that, you know, closing the curtain when the sun goes down will keep the heat inside, right? How to sort of design in these kinds of ways of thinking about these transformations and, the kind of implicit reward, you know, you're warmer all night, right? And, so, you know, it's really seeing this as a design problem and this kind of unlearning question, right? I mean, really seeing this in effect is the project for architects is kind of retrofitting our buildings in terms of insulation and systems and all of these complicated technical things, but also in terms of sort of cultivating these new practices.
Keri Facer (33:43)
I very much hope that as architects shift into this question of cultivating human practices, that they'll engage with the whole field of education that has been thinking about this. There's been some thought about this before.
Daniel Barber (33:54)
I do too.
Keri Facer (33:56)
I'd like to move us on a little bit, if I can, and to keep our focus really firmly on this question of futures, One of the things that I've noticed in a lot of the work that we do with sustainability transitions folks is that there's a sort of missing middle future. So, on one level, people can pretty much deal with the next sort of five, 10 years. It's not too impossible to think with. And then people go into really deep time. know, everybody knows the sun's gonna die. You you get into kind of religious apocalyptic time. So there's a capacity to sort of imagine a radical change in the long term. But the space in the middle is a little schmoochy. It's a little absent. And I know you both operate with timelines in interesting ways. Johannes, you've just finished a project looking at planning a city for the next thousand years. How does that work? And how does that help people think with this sort of interesting timeline? And why did you set that timeline?
Johannes Stripple (34:58)
That was an interesting project. So, I worked with the cathedral in Lund, a large old cathedral in the city center. And the starting point for the church was the church has been there for 1000 years. So, how do we think about the next 1000? And the church owns bits of land in the north of Lund that they want to develop. instead of just start hiring an architect from the start and then starting designing a house, they started thinking that. So, what if our planning horizon is thousand years? What do we then do now? What kinds of commitments, values or infrastructures are we planting that might last and be reinterpreted for centuries? So, of course, you can't plan in any traditional sense over that kind of time scale, but what you can do is to experiment with temporal imagination. You can stage conversation, can build speculative scenarios or even design artifacts that help people emotionally and politically connect to the long now. At the same time, those long horizons have a strange effect on the near term, we found out. It can make the next few decades feel more alive, more contingent, because once you stop assuming that the current trajectory is fixed, you start to see more room for political struggle, cultural change, unexpected transformation. So, if you use things like future artifacts or fictional city, they help make these middle range futures tangible and not just thinkable, but feelable. And when people feel the future, they are more likely, I think, to stay with it, to care for it, and then maybe even to shape for it.
Keri Facer (36:49)
What sorts of artifacts or things helped the cathedral thinkers that shift?
Johannes Stripple (36:55)
We were more studying a group of curators and artists and architects that facilitated this conversation for the church. We were interviewing the curators and the planners and the people from the church. they invited artists to stage to build artworks on the building site. And they stood there for a year or two and I took part in those conversations. So it's been all play for everything from having kids to play with water and mud to having poetry writing sessions and yeah, festivities. They've used a lot of different kinds of formats.
Keri Facer (37:13)
Yeah, it goes back to that experiential futures thing you were referencing, Stuart Candy and Jake Duggan and actually a whole range of other folks work on kind of materializing futures in the present through an artifact to give us something to think with and to give us something to really embody that future. I mean, Daniel, you're a historian, so you must be used to working with very complex and long time scales and timeframes. How do you help people think beyond, like think into this sort of missing middle, if you like. what practices do you use?
Daniel Barber (38:04)
The history of architecture is in a really interesting place right now. We're increasingly sort of hyper aware of the importance of engaging with the existing condition, right? Of reusing existing buildings and sort of understanding at the scales that we've talked about in terms of sort of behavior and practice, but also the scales of material and circular economies and reducing embodied carbon, et cetera. So, there's just sort of a really interesting sort of moment where the history of building practices has a different kind of relationship to its present and future. than we anticipated It was like. The trajectory of modernism was to fill the world with light and freedom. And yet here we are sort of covered in oil and trying to figure out the next step, right? So it's this really kind of different shift, a shift of our relationship to history in that sense. ⁓ This sort of missing middle is often the object of architectural speculation, right? A kind of master planning sort of document will often take a sort of 30 to 50 year time horizon, right? And so, you know, there's a kind of scenario planning aspect that's endemic to the field that's quite sort of familiar in a sense with that sort of projecting. But I think a lot also about Jennifer Wenzel's phrase of the gentrification of the future, right? So the last thing I think about relative to this sort of struggle in a sense with this missing middle and with this question of the future, right? You know, we hear a lot of the kind of 2050, 2070 sort of discussion, right? And I used to teach a class that was the history of architecture of the 20th century, taught from 2050, you know, where we're sort of watching the slow decline of the capacity to, you know, maintain sort of conditions for life. But I think that a lot of what that kind 2050, 2070 question suggests is, so, where do we draw the line? What was the political expediency of some of these line drawings in the near term future, medium term future? Let's say relative to the sort of vagaries of architectural practice in the building industry, isn't it the case that that line has been drawn? I mean, aren't we sort of past a moment where we can be superfluous with our carbon account, right?
Keri Facer (40:22)
Say a little bit more about this drawing the line.
Daniel Barber (40:25)
I mean, saying like, okay, we're there already, right? I mean, like the sort of conditions of crisis are upon us ⁓ if you look outside in the average mid-sized city, there's cranes all over the place. There's steel, glass and concrete towers going up. We're continuing to build these buildings that are not fit to purpose for the carbon free future, right? There's a cultural question, right? But there's clearly a policy question, And a sort of governance question in terms of mechanisms that will, yeah, disincentivize various modes of building. But the question is really in a sense to direct it at architects and how do we begin to sort of reimagine the practice?
Keri Facer (41:06)
One of my increasing worries is the way in which the future gets used in politics as a way of deferring endlessly what we actually need to do in the present. I mean, is the future helpful in this field or is it actually part of the problem,
Daniel Barber (41:21)
Well, this is the kind of overshoot thing as well, right? that's kind of the, you know, general approach to energy efficiency of the building industry and of architects, right? We haven't really shifted our framework.
Keri Facer (41:34)
I mean, the lack of engagement with the materiality of futures... the degree of intentional blindness that we're deploying in our thinking about futures at the moment is really quite disturbing. I mean, Johannes, how does this tie in with you? you've been working on climate politics for years. I mean, do you see the future as something that's been helpful in that field or as something that has kind of got in the way of actually making the sorts of changes we need to make in the present?
Johannes Stripple (42:01)
Good question. I was confronted with that dilemma when we were designing a project around 2070 in a more flooding scenario that happened in the very south of Sweden. So what we then did was that we developed two kinds of scenarios in 2070, two kinds of worlds. And this was a sound walk. In the beginning, the listener could choose within which world would you like your stories to be set? Is it a world of collaboration or conflict? It was a very simple dichotomy there. So, the story we told were the same, but things turned out quite differently in these two worlds. So, what we really then narrated was the decisions from now on, from 2020s to 2070s, so 50 years of decisions that happened. So, in that way, it became very clear for the listeners. I mean, if I had a school class there, if I had some students or a group of policymakers, a few of them took the collaborative scenario, a few other took the more conflictual scenario. So, afterwards, they could compare what happened in the story, how many died and what happened and were there protection, were there things in place that could save lives or these kinds of things. That is, of course, the result of the decisions that we take today. So, I think for us, that was the way of not talking about the future, but really making explicit the five decades of decisions that leads to a point in time when the wind will start blowing and the rain will fall. But it will fall on a society that might be in one of these two places. We have the agency to shape those two places. And that became very powerful. And it's very educational, I think, for the students. And some of my students, they choose to do one, and then they go back and do the second one to see. And they then find out the small nuances. And they really then understand the difference that politics makes.
Keri Facer (44:04)
I mean, this is a very different relationship with futures, a kind of different worldview of walking into the future backwards and seeing what's coming out of the steps we're taking. So, rather than this projective future imaginary, where we construct an image that we attempt to walk towards, we actually recognize that we're walking into the unknown and we're producing the reality out of each of our steps. And with each step we take, something new is gonna come out and looking at those consequences. I mean, one of the ongoing phrases whenever you do any futures work is the old William Gibson phrase, 'The future's already here, it's just unevenly distributed.' We're living in a place that is multiple temporalities and we are paying attention to what's coming out of it. there is a call in some quarters to say that the future's just been the problem. it's a relic of modernist projective thinking, it's a relic of cost benefit analysis. We should give up on the future. We should locate ourselves in the present and caring for what Barbara Adam and Chris Groves call the lived future. So, it's a question of growing from the present. Do you think we'd lose anything if we did that?
Johannes Stripple (45:16)
It's an interesting question. I have a research project that's called At the End of the World, where we are studying emerging apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic ideas. And part of my work is to see that exactly that sense about the collapse of the world, What do you then do with that kind of knowledge? So, I think that is a really different way of thinking than we had in the environmental movement 20 years ago, where it was like the future was still there and the actions we could take today could make a difference with what happened to that kind of future. Of course, I think it's also troublesome that we have that kind of sentiment that things are collapsing and I'm sort of very uneasy with that, but it's still interesting that the status of the future, I think, in environmental movement and discourse has changed recently.
Keri Facer (46:12)
Yeah, Daniel?
Daniel Barber (46:13)
Yeah, no, this is such an interesting set of questions, right? I think what are we holding onto, Willingness to defer, right? Is that sort of what we grasp when we consider the future? Again, I think pedagogically or even sort of rhetorically, I find it necessary almost, right? I mean, and I sort of dabble in scare tactics. Energy demand for air conditioners is expected to rise by 1400 % in the next 75 years. that sort of future scenario sort of thing that makes us look at our present differently, I think is a valuable pedagogical tool. But I think that there's a real, I mean, I'm really sort of attracted to this sort of, you know, the question that pushes against the future as the ⁓ space of validation, how do we relate to our buildings in the present in terms of our kind of daily operations rather than speculating as to some optimized performative future that our modeling system has identified for us, right? I think that's a really powerful caution and sort of check to the impulses of the field.
Keri Facer (47:30)
If we locate agency and possibility in the future, and if that future looks increasingly problematic, then what does that do for the sense of agency and possibility? So, to me, the question is actually where are our resources for agency? Where are our resources for possibility? And in the main, they lie around us. In the main, they lie in the relationships that we're building, in the communities that we're creating, in the sites of what Davina Cooper calls the eutopias, the good spaces in the present, the eutopias. And so for me, I return to futures and pasts and presents all as sites of imaginative possibility that allow us to see the present differently. So, that to me feels like the challenge, not the kind of endless search for the right image of the future. If only we can get there and we tell this better story, we'll solve all of our problems, which is a big thing that the environment movement is doing right now. If only we can get this new, better story of the future, we'll all be fine. Actually, for me, the question is you know, how do we look for and resource spaces of possibility from our histories, from our pasts, from our imagination? Daniel, you wanted to say something.
Daniel Barber (48:41)
A lot of what you're talking about is that it sort of plays out through the framework of practices again, right? And I think insofar as a practice is both in principle a kind of capacity to be in the present, right? I mean, again, I think a lot about learning an instrument, right? And sort of being present with muscle memories and kind of physical conditions and aspirations. But you're also, you're trying to get better, right? It kind of can't not be aspirational at the same time. In thinking about thermal practices it's not about a future where we've solved a problem and I can experience the same sort of universal freshness as in my air conditioned present, but as a current condition where I'm reshaping the life around me in this kind of absurd aspiration, you know, that somehow this can reduce carbon and have some effect on the world, right? I mean, it's this other sort of fantasy, you know, perhaps not the utopia.
Keri Facer (49:39)
It's coming back to the point that you're both making earlier, I think, which is about the value of this work is in examining the assumptions that underpin it. I want to sort of move us on now to just thinking about precisely that question, what challenges your own assumptions? How do you challenge your own assumptions about the future? What do you look for?
Johannes Stripple (49:59)
I've been very inspired recently by a project on walking, which is a very everyday and local activity that you do. So, we have a small project on Lund in 2039. The project is called the Walkscape Award. So, it's a speculative project that imagines that Lund wins an international prize for creating one of the most walkable, livable and socially vibrant environments. What's exciting about the project is that it's not just about mobility, it's then about how we relate to time, space, each other. So, we are asking what happens when you plan a city around slowness, proximity and joy, rather than speed, flow and optimization? So, recently, we've been playing around with it and borrowed an idea that is called the smiles per miles matrix. So, instead of measuring speed or throughput, we asked how delightful, connective or caring is a walk through the city? What kinds of social encounters or sensory pleasures does this street afford? So, just a small shift in framing, but opens up a very different way of thinking about urban futures, not just in terms of infrastructure, but in terms of emotion, atmosphere, everyday life. So, I think that's really inspiring for me right now, how re-imagining something as simple as walking can begin to reorient assumptions around what cities are for. After having been walking with some people who are more attuned to walkability of cities and I walk with them through the city, I then start to sort of recognize the smiles per miles and feel differently about the city. So yeah, it's been very inspiring recently.
Keri Facer (51:39)
I love that, Johannes, not least because of somebody who's moved across a lot of different places. One of the things I know in a very embodied way is that different places smile more at each other. So, there's something very interesting about this, that reframing of the city's quality in terms of its concept of smile. So, I love that. Thank you. What about you, Daniel? What's helping challenge your assumptions about where things might go?
Daniel Barber (52:01)
Yeah, no, it's a great question. This smiles per miles, I think we're kind of trying to do the opposite in a sense in a project that I'm working on right now for the Venice Biennale in which we've been tasked with creating an uncomfortable room, right? It's basically the first room in what's called the Arsenale, a long kind of enfilade of exhibition spaces. And you sort of have to walk through there in order to get into the remainder of the show. Walk into the first room and there will be a number of air conditioners hanging from the ceiling. And as you may know, air conditioners don't actually cool the air, they just move the heat out of the room, right? And so in this case, the heat will be moved into that room that you're walking into. It's often referred to as the waste heat. So, you'll walk into a room that is in fact projected to be Venice in 2125. Although that will be very contingent upon the weather outside. And then as you pass through this first room, pass through, know, if you've been through the kind of meat locker sort of PVC plastic heavy doors, right? Heat sealed. And then you pass through into the space that is being cooled, right? By the chiller side of the conditioners that are then hung on the wall above you. So, in effect, the first room, you're kind of still outside. Yeah, you're kind of still in that other condition, that kind of space of vulnerability and risk. Yeah. And then you sort of pass through into, dare I say, the space more familiar or sort of where our kind of heads live in terms of many of us around the world who kind of anticipate that our worlds will remain kind of more or less the same, even though we still know that it's all falling apart. I mean, that kind of mix of assumptions, it's of course getting more terrifying by the minute, right? I mean, quite literally. So, I guess what's challenging my assumptions is the kind of world around us that yeah, I thought we had a little more time.
Keri Facer (53:43)
Yeah. What seems powerful about what you're doing there is it precisely troubles the timeline, doesn't it? You say you've got a room that you're pumping full of the air conditioning excess heat or waste heat from the other room that you're moving into. So, this is the present. So, you might say this is Venice in 2050, but it's actually the waste heat produced in the now. To me it's a really intentional resisting of a framing of a future that's not yet here. It's also pulling it very closely into the present. And that feels increasingly like something we need to do is to pull this into the now to recognize that the ontological security that we had of thinking this was a future problem is not the reality. This is a thing that is here right now. And then the challenge is, I think, to flip the futures discourse away from, oh, this terrible thing's going to happen, we can fix it. There's this better world that could come. To actually saying the terrible things are happening now, and they've been happening now for a very long time for a large number of people.
Daniel Barber (54:36)
Right, yeah, exactly.
Keri Facer (54:55)
How do we work in that world precisely to do the sort of thing that you're saying, Johannes, of making the decisions, of seeing the consequences of taking responsibility in the present for what's gonna come out? And to me, that's a radical flip of the way in which we use futures. It's a real change, feels an important one to be making.
Daniel Barber (55:13)
I had a question for Johannes... I'm just sort of wondering how you negotiate the darkness and the doomedness, right, of these possible futures and, not only how it sort of gets represented or expressed, but also how we kind of tailor expectations almost, or yeah, trying to kind of understand how people will respond to different visions, if you will, speculations?
Johannes Stripple (55:34)
So, most of the work has been in that critical utopian set in the future where things have gone quite well. So assumption has been that, you know, Sweden is a post-fossil welfare state and we're still here. And we're now looking back on times that were quite hard. But since you're looking backwards from a future where you are all safe and it was fine, you can then easier deal with the things that were tough along the way and things that happened and things that you had to deal with. It's different than starting today and looking forward to the hardship than to be on the other side and then looking back at it. And a lot of people found that really liberating then to know that, we got through, it was tough. And then trying to come up with responses to, okay, so how did you deal with it then? So it's sort of liberating for people to start from that position.
Daniel Barber (56:15)
Yeah, thanks.
Keri Facer (56:23)
Hmm. I mean, this, I remember reading, I don't know if either of you know the Kim Stanley Robinson book 2140. But it's set in the year 2140 in a year when after many experiences of flooding. And what I found interesting about that book was it, it said we didn't fix everything, you know, it's like we didn't, we didn't have the shiny new world where it all went fine and still we survive and still we work and still we're able to make viable lives and still we're making decisions. It's the kind of ongoingness of life in that book that to me feels very powerful. And with a lot of this work... Fundamentally, think I'm interested in how we build that sense of a kind of strength and resilience and capability to keep going, you know, so not to fall for the fragile future you know, here's a shiny world, it'll be lovely. to create that real sense of we keep working, we keep working and we draw our inspiration from a range of places, from our imagination of what might happen and from the past of how we've lived and for the other examples that are already there in the present. We keep working, we continue and we are resilient. That to me is the question of how to build that and that maybe is not a temporal question at all. It might be a question to do with who we are.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (58:01)
I want to step in here, Keri. I think it is a temporal question because another way to think about it is how we move and how we process and moving in process is all about rhythm and time. So, as I was listening to both of you today, Johannes and Daniel, I was thinking what's interesting is that you share with us your practice, your research, and in a way you give us access to a specific rhythm that is the rhythm of how you alternate your perception of the present with your representation of the future. And Johannes, in what you have been discussing, what you have been doing is challenging people by intensifying the rhythm of the alternance between what they experience right here, right now, with how they envision the future. And Daniel, what you're bringing people to be exposed to another sense of what it could be to experience comfort in the future in order to challenge the way they experience it today. So, I think there is something about how we in the present experience that alternance between how we feel now and what we may feel in the future. And I think that it's in this rhythm that has to do with our habits, that has to do with our routines, that we may be able to learn to challenge what we are doing and what we may do differently.
Keri Facer (59:28)
To me, so many of these challenges are questions of attention and can we create space to attend and to notice and to see the different rhythms and temporalities that are at play? And then how do we create the space to allow that attention to land with us and to notice it and to act on it? And that's where the affective issues that you've talked about so beautifully today really, really become critical. So, thank you, Daniel Barber of Eindhoven University and Johannes Stripple of Lunds University. Thank you for your time and we look forward to carrying on the conversation with you. Thanks for now.
Daniel Barber (1:00:06)
Absolutely. Thank you all.
Johannes Stripple (1:00:06)
Thank you.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (1:00:07)
Thank you.
