Such futures bring drastic changes not only to the natural environment but also to our social, cultural, economic, and political relationships, reshaping power relations and increasing social inequalities. All these global threats are present in the local community on an everyday basis and on multiple levels, from the social, economic, technological, and environmental to the psychological.

This complex context calls for reflection on how communities can work together to address specific, localized challenges. Historically, design and architecture, as worldmaking agents, have had the agility to explore diverse versions of the world using speculation and imagination. It is today’s challenge to revisit how design and architecture thinking and doing can contribute to reclaiming imaginations of the future and shape new, bright, and viable future paths. This is particularly relevant in an educational context where universities, research centers, and design and art institutions should be some of the most dynamic speculative spaces.
 
This symposium and the associated summer school seek to investigate these speculative, critical, and future-oriented practices in design and architecture, bringing together educators, thinkers, practitioners, social innovators, local communities, municipalities, and representatives from international and EU institutions. The event aims to foster new collaborations between diverse actors, starting from the bottom-up level, to explore and propose new fluid collaborative platforms for collective engagement, in order to discuss what is a better, i.e. a preferable future and for whom, and to create possible paths and actionable plans (in the here and now) toward those futures.