Transformative Climate Media for Urban Futures: Speakers & Abstracts

The climate catastrophe we face reflects a wider crisis of estrangement from the biophysical supports that enable life to flourish on Earth. At the same time, emerging media formats technologies also allow for new forms of situated storytelling that engage and connect communities within place-based ecologies and environments, allowing for new perspectives, voices and stories to be shared from a range of human and more-than-human perspectives. Could ambient, situated media offer a platform for more ecologically-conscious storytelling, connecting to audiences across senses, situations and habitats?  In this presentation I reflect on a two-decade career exploring this question, designing multi-sensory storytelling platforms, data ecologies and urban media interfaces that elevate more embodied connections to place, habitat and history, sharing stories, challenges and lessons learned. 

Humanity is facing the profound challenge of finding and committing to following globally coherent pathways to sustainable futures via transformative behavior change at the community and regional scales. A crucial part of that challenge requires engaging citizens in all sectors of society in imagining, co-creating, and becoming committed to new patterns of collective behavior that avoid, mitigate, or adapt to rapidly changing climate in urban environments. I will outline ways in which narratives can be used to inform and shape experiences with interactive media and apps to engage with and learn from citizens. The experiences can be informative if they engage people, but equally important is that they can act as boundary objects around which critical dialogues can be stimulated and structured.

Interactive documentaries (interdocs) are web-based projects that engage viewers in the process of narrating an account of reality. Interdocs give users choices to influence the flow and narration, and they enable - generatively and rule-based - different montages of a story and the integration of multimedia segments.

In discourses on interactive documentaries, enabling multiperspectivity and polyvocality are often emphasized as their central qualities. Together with their nonlinear character, this results in a format that is supposed to be particularly suitable for the representation and processing of crisis situations. Interdocs are said to allow the representation of complexity and precariousness that is characteristic of crisis situations. 

At the same time, interdocs are based on a special form of addressing or invoking users: Through moments of decision, the viewers become actors. This involvement in decisions is linked to the promise of specific experiences. For the issue of climate change, which is often framed in many aspects as a question of individual (consumption) decisions, this approach is both interesting and problematic. In my presentation, I will use the example of "The Shoreline Project", an interactive documentary about rising sea levels, to explore questions of conveying information, generating awareness, and guiding action. Is this a best practice example? Can the experience gained from interactive documentaries actually create ›climate awareness‹ and point to possible actions and solutions? Or is there a danger that the call to action will be exhausted in the click of a web page?

The LOCALISED project follows an action-oriented approach to climate planning that may help regions and communities achieve their climate goals. It looks at their individual geographic, social, and economic specificities to suggest comprehensive measure sets to cut emissions and to address their climate vulnerabilities.
Offering narratives of change for citizens and blueprints for citizen co-creation shall establish a radically new role of citizens and local groups in enabling the urban transition.
Drawing on LOCALISED as an example, Tobias Gralke and Bernd Hezel discuss how localising and concretising the deliberation and planning of measures for emission reduction and adaptation to climate impacts can help overcome common barriers to action for municipalities and citizens.

The LOCALISED project follows an action-oriented approach to climate planning that may help regions and communities achieve their climate goals. It looks at their individual geographic, social, and economic specificities to suggest comprehensive measure sets to cut emissions and to address their climate vulnerabilities.
Offering narratives of change for citizens and blueprints for citizen co-creation shall establish a radically new role of citizens and local groups in enabling the urban transition.
Drawing on LOCALISED as an example, Tobias Gralke and Bernd Hezel discuss how localising and concretising the deliberation and planning of measures for emission reduction and adaptation to climate impacts can help overcome common barriers to action for municipalities and citizens.

How can we imagine multispecies cities? How can we hack our anthropocentric worldviews to do so? How can we hack our human-centric senses? How can we create immersive experiences that trigger truly emphatic imagination towards other species? My entry point to this is the consideration of the cognitive-sensorial systems of nonhuman species, in other words, to address the challenge of tapping into the perspective of other species sensorial worlds to create more emphatic visions of cities. One question that drives my PhD research is how we can integrate multisensorial/immersive experiences of nonhuman species into exercises of imagination or scenario building for future cities. I argue that this can benefit from articulating knowledge and methods from sensory ecology (science about other species senses),  posthuman/relational science fiction for the creation of multispecies cities futures, multispecies ethnography and art-based methods toembody other-than-human sensorial experiences, and interactive design with immersive technologies (use of augmented reality to simulate other species senses). I will discuss inspirational examples and comment some of my past and current work on science fiction, speculative design, as co-editor of the second edition of Multispecies Cities Anthology,  as a fellow of the Next Generation Foresight Practitioners community and awardee 2022 with the project “DIY transformations to multispecies cities”

In 2014, as part of an interdisciplinary research group from the Brandenburg University of Technology, we had been commissioned by the Federal Institute for Research on Building, Urban Affairs and Spatial Development (BBSR) to study a wide range of works from the genre of science fiction in order to assess their “insights” for urban planning. As it turned out, the major contribution of the study was rather methodological: It had to do away with the assumption that science fiction provides insights about the future and that, different from spatial planning, science fiction is rather unconstrained in the way it envisions the future. In our talk, we will use these experiences from our previous study and apply them to a fictitious scenario: How do we go about this task if we would be asked again today, to study works of science fiction and assess their insightfulness for urban planning in relation to climate change?

Impact begins with the process. Thus, Creative Climate Cities (CCC) puts the emphasis on the design process rather than on the final product in their practice. As designers of learning platforms, strategy papers or digital planning tools, it became evident that the experience-based knowledge, which emerges through the design process is a key activity to trigger change of planning cultures and relationships between actors and decision makers.

The added values of process design and knowledge transfer will be presented through three projects from the field of the Circular City. The different approaches and products will be explained as well as the learnings during the implementation phase. Based on these insights, three hypotheses will be discussed with the audience. Participants are invited to brainstorm potential media products and services and to form new collaborations for transformative urban design.

In 2014, as part of an interdisciplinary research group from the Brandenburg University of Technology, we had been commissioned by the Federal Institute for Research on Building, Urban Affairs and Spatial Development (BBSR) to study a wide range of works from the genre of science fiction in order to assess their “insights” for urban planning. As it turned out, the major contribution of the study was rather methodological: It had to do away with the assumption that science fiction provides insights about the future and that, different from spatial planning, science fiction is rather unconstrained in the way it envisions the future. In our talk, we will use these experiences from our previous study and apply them to a fictitious scenario: How do we go about this task if we would be asked again today, to study works of science fiction and assess their insightfulness for urban planning in relation to climate change?

Climate Community Street Play is a project that brings the urban challenges of the climate crisis to the streets. Through a process of artistic research, a series of street games were developed with students and youth from diverse backgrounds in different cities (Berlin, Bangkok, Chiang Mai). All of them tell stories of people and other living beings who have to cope with the local challenges of global warming. Whether it's fighting for street trees during droughts, turning heat islands into cool areas, protecting vulnerable groups, rescuing animals during floods, or finding the way to biodiverse niches as pollinators – there are many ways to act in this climate crisis. The interplay of local, cross-species relationships of give-and-take and mutual support lies at the heart of a climate community.

Climate Community Street Play was initiated by Myriel Milicevic and Ruttikorn Vuttikorn.

We all carry an imperative to imagining collectively more just cities, to engaging more meaningfully with multiple urban actors and their different sensibilities through their stories. Storytelling helps to foster empathy, to understand the meaning of complex experiences, and, most importantly, to inspire action. With the rise of the digital era and new technologies at hand, we have an opportunity to redefine not only the way we tell, connect, and engage with our collective stories, but also how we work together in forming them. Based on the research design project Patrimonio Vivo | Living Heritage, grounded in the city of Medellín, this article illustrates the dynamics and potentials of co-creation with cultural organizations and creative teams through learning alliances. Our alliance among a cultural community centre, a cooperative of architects, a grassroot organisation and post-graduate students around the world used storytelling to propel an ecology of urban knowledges. Working online during the global lockdown, we mobilised stories of solidarity, care, memory, and livelihoods through the narrative of people, places, and organisations following their trajectories as the basis for the design of spatial strategies. This collaborative work aimed at contributing to the recognition of everyday spatial practices in self-built neighbourhoods as a form of “living heritage” of the city and a key building block for reframing a more progressive “integral neighbourhood upgrading” practice. I argue that using storytelling as a co-creative methodology, based on learning alliances, we can bridge the ecology of urban knowledges to foster cognitive justice and transform the current stigmatizing urban narrative of self-built neighbourhoods.

Listening to Climate Change research project explores sound and new media formats for producing multisensory knowledge about climate change, while actively engaging citizens with the current ecological crisis through listening. Sound travels through and around space and has physical, emotional and informational affect, which can be used to better perceive climate change impacts such as extreme weather, biodiversity loss and modification of the built environment and infrastructure. This project draws from acoustic ecology, sound art, new media and climate change research to bring together sound’s experiential and immersive qualities with scientific facts across temporal and spatial scales and provide with new possibilities for the perception of climate change. The main objective of the project is to develop creative methods specific to the transformation of existing soundscapes based on environmental variables and climate change scenarios, and to explore how participatory engagement with everyday sounds can generate new insights into auditory perception of the environment. The development of an interactive media application prototype will invite listeners to record and creatively process soundscapes in response to climate scenarios, individual evaluation and emotional situation, and share them within a network. This sound exploration acts both as a case study for assessing auditory perception of the environment, and as a participatory sound design process that responds to user input. The resulting sounds will offer reimagined and speculative versions of soundscapes as a way to navigate and experience plausible future states of human and more-than-human life.

Link to the project website:https://www.filmuniversitaet.de/forschung-transfer/forschung/projekte/projektseite/detail/listening-to-climate-change-the-role-of-sound-and-new-media-formats-for-enhancing-environmental-perception

Climate change is a complex and multifaceted issue that requires a variety of approaches in order to effectively address it. While facts and data are important in understanding the scope and scale of the problem, they often fail to fully engage people on an emotional level. This is where the arts can play a crucial role in creating an affective approach to climate change.
This input shows how arts (storytelling, theatre, visual arts, ...) evoke emotions such as empathy, compassion, and hope and thereby can inspire individuals to take action on climate change and make a difference in their own lives and communities.
Furthermore, the input discusses how the arts can be a powerful tool for amplifying the voices of marginalized communities and bringing attention to the disproportionate impacts of climate change on these groups It will question if the arts arts can serve as a powerful force in creating an affective approach to climate change, by centering on emotions and personal connections rather than just facts and data and therefore could engage people emotionally and inspire action in order to address this pressing global issue more effectively.

Following soon

In the event of a natural disaster, local authorities often have to rely on limited experience and sporadic training to make important and lifesaving decisions. This increases the stress levels of the workforce involved in the response effort and can result in an inaccurate assessment of the situation with potentially catastrophic consequences. oKat-SIM aims to support local administrative offices in natural disaster situations by providing augmented reality (AR)-based training to public authorities in order to increase geohazard awareness and improve associated responses. Our initial focus is on possible flood and landslide scenarios in three different regions of Germany: the lowlands of Görlitz, urbanized Leverkusen, and the mountainous Garmisch-Partenkirchen region. These scenarios are based on state-of-the-art modelling of realistic, cascading natural disaster events and incorporate environmental parameters such as precipitation, high-resolution topography, and examples from past events. Together with local partners, we are developing training simulations adapted to the threats posed by natural disasters in each of the study areas. We use the Unity game engine to translate GIS-based data and modeling results into the AR simulation environment. AR training immerses the participants in realistic states of emergency while maintaining direct communications, which results in safer and more rapid decision making that will ultimately protect communities from natural disasters. The success of the training will be evaluated by cognitive science methods including measuring the learning effect under different stress levels. These measurements will be used to modify the training environment to achieve optimal learning results.

Any attempt to make the range of possible futures subject to discussion in the here and now entails choices in content and form, making futuring a highly situated craft. A typology of 'imaginative logics' (Pelzer & Versteeg 2019) distinguishes between doable, juxtaposing, defamiliarizing/guerrilla, and procedural logics. Such choices influence how 'the future' can become the subject of discussion or debate, because different imaginative logics 1) portray possible futures as either desirable and closed or negotiable and open; 2) portray the available choices for action as ranging from limited to endless, and 3) forge distinct relations with, and convey different expectations to, the audience or public. Drawing on the imaginative logics present in futuring interventions such as the Post-Fossil City Contest, Places of Hope and Climaginaries, I explore the tensions between desirable and negotiable futures, and the importance of addressing those tensions to bring about a fruitful interaction.