The desire for a different world

Introduction?

“Have we got locked into something?”- rhetorically asked Derk Loorbach. Yes, we are locked into capitalism, with all its consequences, from more abstract ones as cultural imaginaries, to more concrete ones as infrastructure and ways of production. However, we need to build fair and sustainable transitions in order to exit (or mitigate) the current world crises. And, for this change, what do we have to do??

First, as said by Luca Bertolini, we need to create the desire for a different world. We need to confront the existing models, “we need to fight and to build another model” - defends Flor Avelino. But there are many challenges and limitations in creating these new scenarios and then in managing this transition in practice, as shown by all of them, mainling by Loorbach. In any case, through these three inspiring and provocative lectures that took place in the fall of 2022 at Beursschouwburg, city center of Brussels, as part of the Stads Salons Urbains series, it’s clear for me that we have no choice but to try.?

By discussing prefigurative politics and possibilities in scenario construction, the aim of this short paper is to link some concepts from these three lectures, such as collective imagination, uncertainty in transition management, innovation and power. It supports these first lectures’ broad idea of exploring the transition possibilities using the tools offered by the urban environment and the cities as living laboratories for research and experimentation.?

Collective imagination and prefigurative politics?

Bertolini’s study focuses on the experimentation in city streets to transform urban mobility, and considers this “urban experimentation” as prefigurative politics. His main research question was “how to change in the face of complexity, uncertainty, resistance?”.??

From discussions around this topic, it seems that an important part of starting a transition process, even before theoretically exploring new scenarios, is to deconstruct and to overcome some of our strongly established social constructions. From this challenge, comes the one of spreading information and communicating, in order to build some kind of consensus about possible new ways of thinking, of doing things, inshort, about this possible new future.“There is always a need to make things visible and acknowledge”, said Bertolini.?

Not only Bertolini’s lecture mentioned collective imagination. Loorbach, in his lecture about Designing radical transitions, also explored social constructions when he mentioned the “regime” concept, as the dominant and shared ways of thinking. Collective imagination and regimes are sets of shared values that end up shaping our social behavior and finally our concrete world, including our cities.?

The term prefigurative politics refers to the premise that a social movement needs to employ means that are coherent with, and that somehow already shape, the ends it wants to achieve, “an organization or movement that itself embodies those forms of social relations, decision-making, culture, and human experience that are [its] ultimate goal” (Boggs, 1977 apud Raekstad 2018). In other words, “movements should do their best to choose means that ‘prefigure’ the kind of society they want to bring about.” (Leach, 2013)

But how can we prefigure in contemporary practices a future society that we do not know? For this paper, I mainly based my findings about prefigurative politics on the work of Paul Raekstad, University of Amsterdam, which searches for a post-capitalist society perspective, and states that exactly for that reason prefigurative politics also implies the “hypothetical formulation of alternatives and their continuous reformulation through trial and error; as such, prefigurative practices must be ‘inherently experimental and experiential’” (Sande 2015 apud Raekstad, 2018). Even though power relations, necessities, and ways of thinking of a future society are not fully possible to exist under the current system, “all that is needed is to assume that the requisite powers, needs, and consciousness can be developed to some extent despite capitalism, that is, within the struggle against it, and that doing so is necessary to transition beyond it.” (Raekstad, 2018)

Raekstad also affirms that prefigurative organizations and movements are likely to be the best at generating radical needs, that people participating in these experiences “come to acquire a radical new need for the freedom, equality, community, and democracy that they embody.” (Raekstad, 2018) I interpret these radical needs to be the same as the desire for a different world mentioned by Bertolini, but while this desire can be very abstract, after prefigurative experimentation people could have some concrete ideas instead:

Really free and democratic structures and institutions do not yet exist in the economy or polity. It is difficult, if not impossible, to know how to organize production in a free and democratic way if one has no prior experience of organizing in such ways; it is hard to feel the need to live in such a way if you have never experienced anything like it; and it can be hard for people to believe it is even possible in the absence of any experience of it. Prefigurative practice can change all this.?(Raekstad, 2018)

What if? - scenario construction?

With the perspective of prefigurative politics, what if we are able to think of possible futures, to design scenarios within participative and transdisciplinary processes? In this case, Bertolini’s “what if” questions are very useful:?

Scenarios are qualitative narratives about the future that examine possible structural changes and their consequences. They can be understood as thought experiments of the type “what if”.??(Sohst, R. et al., 2020)

About scenario construction, a large part of my research was based on a study developed at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology by Arnim Wiek, Claudia Binder, and Roland W. Scholz. They approached the functions of scenarios in transition processes as part of the four requirements of transition management they established: knowledge generation, integration, adaptation, transdisciplinarity (Wiek, Arnim, et al, 2006).?

If we consider that scenario construction is not only focused on the result, but instead has important value in its processes, it could be characterized as prefigurative. These processes can be an opportunity for cooperation between policymakers and academia, “supporting conversation, collaboration and mutual learning processes between science and society” (Wiek, Arnim, et al, 2006).??

One point repeatedly noted in the scenario studies is the substantial educational impact and mind-broadening effect of the scenario-building process on the research teams and participants. The challenge for scenario studies is how to extend these benefits to non-participants of the process – individuals and institutions alike. ?(Sohst, R. et al., 2020)

Since the future of urban issues is not likely to follow linear trends, scenarios could be more useful than mere quantitative forecasts approaches, inasmuch as they consider complexity, and so explore interactions between variables, feedback mechanisms, giving importance to the context in order to understand phenomena.?

Organizational and societal systems, such as cities, sectors or companies, experience an ongoing process of change. For such systems, we consider transitions to be structured developments from one relatively stable state to another. A transition in this context is conceived of as the large-scale, long-term development of a system in which some of its fundamentals (i.e., knowledge, rules, norms, practices, and structures) significantly change. (Wiek, Arnim, et al, 2006)

According to Loorbach, there are lots of different attitudes responding to “transition”. In any case, we should consider that the transitional state comprises an “out of the equilibrium” state, that only after brings some type of reconfiguration. It means: chaos. Bertolini also concludes that scaling up prefigurative experiences is a challenge and presents one dilemma after another, so it is better to have not upscaling, but “open-ended processes that evolve through time”, adapting to real needs, complexity, chaos and change. Perhaps we need to accept chaos, to accept some level of uncertainty, even within planning. Is it possible or are planning and uncertainty antitheses, being part of very different approaches??

One interesting Master thesis presented by a former MUS student, Jan Denoo, in June 2019, deals with the matter of uncertainty in urban planning, bringing some insights about “decolonizing the future”. He brought interesting authors and some types of uncertainty I consider are related to the topic we are discussing here, as for example the “process uncertainty” that arises within individuals and groups that “need to consider and try to agree about a desirable future and about how to get there.” (Abbott, 2005. apud Denoo). And also:?

One of the ways of doing this is through planning as it is about ‘trying to explore different futures and to influence the links between the present and a desired future by preparing and implementing a plan. ?(Abbott, 2005: 244)

But which individuals and groups will participate in the decision-making process, in this transition? Using prefigurative politics is possible to avoid repeating the same inequalities we experience now.?

As stated by Lefebvre, processes of socioenvironmental change are never socially or ecologically neutral, and “it is this nexus of power and the social actors deploying or mobilizing these power relations that ultimately decide who will have access to or control over, and who will be excluded from access to or control over, resources or other components of the environment”(Heynen, Nik, et al.,2006). In her lecture about The transformative power of social innovation for just sustainability transitions, Flor Avelino approached types of power contestations. One of her research questions was “is power conflictual or consensual?”, and she also explored how these power contestations can be centered or diffused, using at a certain point lobby and protest movements as examples.?

Harvey’s answer would be that “the power to organize space derives from a whole complex of forces mobilized by diverse social agents. It is a conflictual process.” (Harvey, 1989) And Paulo Freire, the most notorious Brazilian educator and philosopher, used to emphasize that freedom is an achievement and not a donation, and it demands a permanent search: “Nobody has freedom to be free: on the contrary, one fights for it precisely because one doesn't have it.”(Freire, 2014) One can conclude that some level of conflict (if not a high level of contestation) is necessary for this change and this transition to really be possible and fair.

Conclusion?

In order to build fair and sustainable transitions to exit or mitigate the current world crises, we first need to create the desire for a different world. This desire can be translated into the radical needs that emerge when people experience prefigurative politics in a context of urban experimentation, as shown by Luca Bertolini, for instance. Prefigurative practices help to shape a new collective imagination, anticipating the values and ways of operating in a new social system.?

Scenario construction could be another possible tool in order to make transition possible and concrete. In addition, since urban systems and societies are complex systems, we must consider uncertainty as part of the transition management, including within planning. Attention must be paid to the power relationships that currently exist and need to be reformulated as well.?

This short paper showed some connections between important concepts discussed in three lectures of the Stads Salons Urbains series, supporting the idea of exploring the transition possibilities using the tools offered by the urban environment, using cities as living laboratories for research and experimentation.

?Recalling the phrase by Antoine de Saint Exupéry, at Citadelle, 1948:

“Pour ce qui est de l’avenir, il ne s’agit pas de le prévoir, mais de le rendre possible.”?

References?

Stads Salons Urbains Lectures:?

14.10.2022 | Luca Bertolini (University of Amsterdam) | Urban experimentation as prefigurative politics? City streets, for example

25.11.2022 | Gordon Walker (Lancaster University) | The overheating city: Unliveable killing machines or inclusive adaptation?

09.12.2022 | Flor Avelino (Utrecht University) | The transformative power of social innovation for just sustainability transitions?

09.12.2022 | Derk Loorbach (Erasmus University Rotterdam) | Designing radical transitions

Other:

Abbott, John. ‘Understanding and Managing the Unknown: The Nature of Uncertainty in Planning’. Journal of Planning Education and Research, vol. 24, no. 3, Mar. 2005, pp. 237–51. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456X04267710.

Boggs, Carl. 1977. Marxism, Prefigurative Communism, and the Problem of Workers' Control. Radical America 11 (November), 100; cf. Boggs Jr., Carl. Revolutionary Process, Political Strategy, and the Dilemma of Power. Theory & Society 4,No. 3 (Fall), 359-93.?

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogia do Oprimido. Paz e Terra, 2014.

Harvey D. (1989) “From managerialism to entrepreneurialism: the transformation in urban governance in late capitalism”, Geografiska Annaler - Series B, 71, 1, p. 3-17????

Heynen, Nik, et al., editors. In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism. Routledge, 2006.

Leach, Darcy K. Chapter “Prefigurative Politics” in the book: Snow, David A., editor. The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements. Wiley, 2013.

Raekstad P. Revolutionary practice and prefigurative politics: A clarification and defense. Constellations. 2018;25:359–372. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12319?

Sohst, R., J. Tjaden, H. de Valk and S. Melde (2020). The Future of Migration to Europe: A Systematic Review of the Literature on Migration Scenarios and Forecasts. International Organization for Migration, Geneva, and the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute, the Hague.

Wiek, Arnim, et al. ‘Functions of Scenarios in Transition Processes’. Futures, vol. 38, no. 7, Sept. 2006, pp. 740–66. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2005.12.003.

The Quest for Uncertainty - Decolonizing the Future in Urban Planning” Jan Denoo. Supervisor: Prof. Bas van Heur Advisor: Prof. Dr. Michael Ryckewaert. Master thesis presented in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Urban Studies (VUB) and Master of Science in Geography, general orientation, track ‘Urban Studies’ (ULB). June 3, 2019