Event of the AESOP Thematic Group ‘Public SpaceS and Urban Cultures’
10-11 September 2025, Eindhoven, NL
Hosted by Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e)
Prefiguring Hopeful Futures is a two-day, workshop-based symposium that brings together researchers, designers, artists, and practitioners to explore how small-scale, experimental, and everyday prefigurative practices shape just, sustainable, and multispecies futures. Structured around three intersecting strands— futures in the everyday, ecological transitions, and more-than-human design—the event invites critical, creative, and speculative engagements with urban action as a site of transformation.
We invite interested participants to submit an expression of interest by no later than 15 July 2025, by email to
Overview
Prefiguring Hopeful Futures is a two-day workshop-based symposium that brings together scholars, designers, artists, and community practitioners engaged in hopeful, situated, and more-than-human urban practices. Hosted by Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) and building on the legacy of the JPI-ENUTC project ‘CoNECT’ (www.jpiconect.eu), the event will explore how (small-scale, experimental, or everyday) prefigurative actions in urban environments contribute to the shaping of just, sustainable, and multispecies futures. Rather than treating topics like climate transition, community care, or ecological design as separate silos, this event reads them as overlapping zones of transformation. With an emphasis on practice as theory and engagement as speculation, the symposium offers space for grounded exchange, mutual learning, and co-creation. Through dialogues, site visits, and workshops, we will trace fragments of alternative futures already contained in the urban present.
The symposium is organized around three intersecting strands, understood as shared lenses and as part of a larger conversation about reimagining urban life:
- Futures in the everyday: How do seemingly ordinary practices and spaces (maintenance, rituals, routines) carry the seeds of larger transformation? This strand looks at how hope is cultivated through grounded, lived experience.
- Ecological transitions as collective practices: Moving beyond abstract sustainability goals, this strand focuses on urban responses to climate and ecological crises that are participatory, embedded in local cultures, and attentive to interdependence across species and systems.
- Designing more-than-human urban futures: Exploring how design practices, from speculative tools to spatial experiments, can shape inclusive, post-human urban imaginaries. Emphasis is placed on multispecies cohabitation, rewilding, and situated care ecologies.
Theme
Amid social, ecological, and political crises, it is urgent to imagine and enact urban futures grounded in justice, care, and interdependence. While dominant systems often appear insurmountable, alternative spaces of reimagination persist: in community gardens, local commons, neighbourhood assemblies, experimental housing, and everyday acts of maintenance. These practices are often provisional and situated, offering glimpses of different worlds through small but meaningful gestures. As per Ernst Bloch’s understanding of “concrete utopias” (1988 [1957]), hope is not a passive condition, but an active engagement with possibility, forged in specific socio-material contexts.
This symposium is animated by the lens of prefiguration, a way of understanding political and spatial practices as experiments in living otherwise (Franks, 2018; Maeckelbergh, 2016). Through this lens, even small actions can be read as expressions of hope: hopeful not because they promise closure or totalizing solutions, but because they embody situated, relational responses to the challenges of the present and alternatives to business-as-usual. Prefigurative hope is not an abstract ideal but something practiced, an ongoing process grounded in everyday life, local ecologies, and collective imagination.
Furthermore, urban futures are increasingly understood as deeply entangled with non-human agency, ecological interdependencies, and the material politics of urban nature (Latour, 2005; Haraway, 2003; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). From green infrastructure and multispecies habitats to post-human design approaches and neighbourhood rewilding, prefigurative practices today often reflect a growing recognition of nature not as aesthetic background, but as part of the urban community. As alternatives to the ways of thinking and acting that produced our current crises, we understand ecological transition, collective care, and post-human imaginaries as overlapping in practice and thought, forming intersecting strands of a broader urban transformation: woven together in urban commons and everyday actions that test and shape more liveable, multispecies futures.
This symposium seeks to gather a wide range of perspectives – empirical, theoretical, and artistic – that explore what kinds of hopeful worlds are imagined, tested, or enacted through situated urban and ecological practices; how these practices express enduring hope for the future in the present; in what ways ecological transition, collective care, and more-than-human relations are braided together in urban life; and how such actions might inspire others through example, reproduction, or resonance.
We are especially interested in grounded practices and experimental formats that help us trace the overlapping strands of hopeful urban futures, including but not limited to:
- Cultures of care and mutual aid
- Climate-resilient and biodiverse urban practices
- Sufficiency and the good life beyond consumerism
- Situated, more-than-human design approaches
- Plural forms of dwelling and co-governance
- Participatory futuring and inclusive collective practices
We invite contributions from across planning, geography, urban sociology, architecture, and design. In keeping with the theme of prefiguring alternatives, we are open to formats and approaches that reimagine the role of research and academia. Our aim is to co-create a space that foregrounds urban transformation as both imaginative and practical, where nature, community, and design are understood as interdependent elements of a hopeful, post-anthropocentric urban future.
References
Bloch, E. (1988 [1957]). The Principle of Hope, Volume 1. Boston, MA: MIT Press.
Franks, B. (2018). Prefiguration. In C. Levy (ed.), Anarchism (pp. 28–43). Routledge.
Graeber, D. (2013). It is value that brings universes into being. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 3(2), 219–243.
Haraway, D. (2003). The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Maeckelbergh, M. (2016). The prefigurative turn: The time and place of social movement practice. In Dinerstein, A.C. (ed.), Social Sciences for An Other Politics: Women Theorizing Without Parachutes (pp. 121–134). Palgrave.
Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Format and practical information
10–11 September 2025, Eindhoven, the Netherlands.
This is a participatory and hands-on symposium, designed to foster exchange and shared exploration rather than formal paper delivery. We envisage a mix of workshops, short presentations, site-based activities, and group dialogue, and welcome a wide range of formats and disciplinary perspectives. This may include:
- (Short) academic papers
- Creative or artistic works
- Posters or visual storytelling
- Design tools or speculative methods
- Community or site-based practices
- Participatory workshops or experiments
Contributions should align with the event’s themes and values, particularly its emphasis on contextual, inclusive, and more-than-human perspectives. In keeping with the theme of prefiguring alternatives, we are open to formats and approaches that reimagine the role of research and academia.
There is no registration fee, but participants are responsible for their own travel and accommodation. Lunch will be provided, as will a shared symposium dinner on Wednesday 10 September. Recommended accommodation options and travel information will be shared with accepted participants.
Submission process
We invite interested participants to submit an expression of interest by no later than 15 July 2025, by email to
- A short abstract or proposal (up to 300 words) describing the focus and content of your contribution;
- The preferred format of your contribution: presentation, workshop, creative work, or site-based activity;
- A short bio (max 100 words), including your background and affiliation.
A pre-event webinar and feedback session will be offered in early August to connect contributors and support preparation.
Organizers
Dr. Oana Druta (Eindhoven University of Technology)
Louwrens Botha (Eindhoven University of Technology)
Giulia Gualtieri (Eindhoven University of Technology)
Representatives of AESOP Thematic Group Public Spaces and Urban Cultures: Mohamed Saleh (University of Groningen, the Netherlands), Tihomir Viderman (BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg, Germany)
More information on AESOP Thematic Group Public Spaces and Urban Cultures series on Hope can be found here: https://aesop-planning.eu/tg-news/public-spaces-and-urban-cultures/call-for-expressions-of-interest-to-host-the-thematic-groups-meeting-2024-2026-public-spaces-urban-cultures-and-hope
