Navigate Change, Foster Resilience, and Co-create the Cities We Need

 Speculative Futures: Design Approaches to Navigate Change, Foster Resilience, and Co-create the Cities We Need by Johanna Hoffman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

30 March, 2023, published as “Pushing ThOur Boundaries,” The Berkeley Times, Knox Book Beat.      

      Speculative Futures: Design Approaches to Navigate Change, Foster Resilience, and Co-create the Cities We Need, by Johanna Hoffman, (2022) from Berkeley’s North Atlantic Books, is simply marvelous. An absolute relief when contemplating not only the common-sense/realistic but the fantastic/boundless transformations as SIMULTANEOUSLY POSSIBLE. 

      She may be “all spin,” but I don’t care. Anybody who uses examples from Blade Runner and Black Panther; calls out the “negative impacts of 1950s urban planning" as well as the racism/classism of the 2020 Oakland “Slow Streets” redevelopment; and has chapter titles like “Shared Language” and “Collective Imagination” has my interest and support right away. 

    

     She knows the structures must be “doable,” even though “the future is not a destination, but a process and a path.” (p. 150) Hoffman (Joanna in Wikipedia) herself is diversely undefinable as marketing executive, urban planner and “had a reputation at both Apple and NeXT as one of the few who could successfully engage with (Steve) Jobs,” particularly in writing the first draft of the Macintosh User Interface Guidelines. (Wikipedia) 

“Speculative futures tools help us:
        • challenge the status quo
        • increase individual and social resilience
        • balance short-term needs with long-term change, reorienting our understanding of cities toward more adaptive capacity
        • create more collaborative and equitable development by supporting cooperation over persuasion (My italics. wc) (I particularly like that one)
        • shift our collective imagination toward resilient possibility and cultivate more proactive planning as a result.”

      Her “Takeaway: By giving us permission to imagine, speculative futures encourage a shift in attitude from “What’s the problem?” to “What’s possible?” In doing so, they question our assumptions about existing norms to see if they’re really the paradigms we want to shape what lies ahead. … Speculative futures offer practices that create the forward-thinking, adaptive plans that modern uncertainty requires.”
“This is the time for imagination…Assuming that devastation is the entirety of what’s ahead is limited thinking. What if the best times are still to come? We owe it to ourselves and future generations to ask. The tools to help us ask are there. We just have to use them.”

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