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Imagining Transformation: Applied Theater and the Making of Collaborative Future Scenarios

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Abstract

A key challenge for geographers today is to enable and develop creative practice that imagines and engenders alternatives to existing political, economic and ecological practices. This paper examines the applied theater project The Factory of the Future. The project used critical creative methodologies wherein collaborative, improvised, speculative, and open-ended future scenarios were imagined. The paper reflects on the facilitation of the project in order to develop a practical understanding of how capacities for transformation can be nurtured through applied theater.

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... Following these trends, in this paper, we focus on 'applied theatre' and propose to develop Urban Drama Labs. Applied theatre is here understood as an umbrella term that embraces collaborative and participatory artistic performance taking place outside the theatre, in educational, community or political contexts (see Sachs Olsen, 2022). ...
... The Factory of the Future (2019) was an applied theatre project curated by Cecilie Sachs Olsen, the first author of this article, and developed by the British performance maker Zoe Svendsen (for a detailed account of the project, see Sachs Olsen, 2022). The performance was part of the Oslo Architecture Triennale -a 10-week festival that occurs in Oslo every three years, providing a public arena for discussing and addressing urban challenges. ...
Article
In this paper we introduce the Urban Drama Lab as a new manifestation of Urban Living Labs. We expand current debates concerning Urban Living Labs by contrasting and comparing them with knowledge and practices developed in the field of theatre and performance. This enables us to scrutinise the ways in which stakeholders, issues and interests are represented and, in extension, performed in Urban Living Labs. We argue that this is important for two reasons: (1) because the current focus of Urban Living Labs on offering a real-world testing ground for urban experimentation constitutes a specific way of representing and performing stakeholders, issues, and interests, but that (2) questions of representation are seldom explicitly addressed because Urban Living Labs are seen to offer direct access to the real-world in a presumably ‘neutral’ setting. The Urban Drama Lab foregrounds that Urban Living Labs can never be neutral and free from structures of power but that they can set up a frame in which these structures can be scrutinised, assessed and possibly remodelled and rearranged. We conclude that the Urban Drama Lab might enable a fuller understanding of how the Urban Living Lab may address not only complex urban challenges, but also how it might also engage better with the power relations, contestations, conflicts and politics that are often at the core of these challenges.
... The paper uses my curation of the Oslo Architecture Triennale 2019 to discuss the challenges and potentials for developing an urban attention ecology in practice. In doing this, the paper brings together a suite of my previous work (Sachs Olsen, 2023, 2022a, 2022b, 2021Sachs Olsen & Juhlin, 2021). While I have previously discussed the idea of an urban attention ecology (see Sachs Olsen, 2022a), this paper is the first to explore in depth what the urban attention ecology is and the specific role of the arts in developing and promoting it through critical spatial practice. ...
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This paper starts from a two-fold observation: firstly, that attention rests at the core of our environmental challenges; and secondly, that by becoming (more) attentive to the modified, transformed, and controlled urban environments in which we dwell, we may be better equipped to attend to these challenges. The paper therefore develops and introduces “an urban attention ecology” that seeks to expand our ability to attend to urban form in ways that open possibilities to critically address and creatively negotiate the ways in which cities are built and inhabited. The potentials and challenges of the urban attention ecology are thought through in a practice-based account of a broad range of critical spatial practices centring around the theme of degrowth. These practices took the form of performances, installations, and other artistic projects that the author gathered, developed and presented as curator of the Oslo Architecture Triennale 2019. Cover photo: The Factory of the Future at the Norwegian Centre for Design and Architecture. OAT / Istvan Virag.
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The aim of this article is to see how awareness of sustainable development and environmental justice can be increased and operationalized in planning through the use of scenarios. On scrutinizing four long-term urban development strategies for Stockholm, we found that they all intend to depict a sustainable urban development, but the resultant images are very different. This article underlines the importance of combining environmental justice with an understanding of environmental threats and risks. We see that the carrying capacity of nature is limited, but we also see the need to share resources justly and make sure that environmental degradation does not systematically strike certain groups only. The conceptual elements are applied to four scenarios for a future Stockholm, zooming in to some extent on a suburban shopping node just outside the city. The point of focusing on it is that such shopping areas are sometimes seen as symbols of non-sustainable city development, but, since they are already in place, their function in the future city needs to be discussed. © 2011 The Authors. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research
Article
What is the role of utopian visions of the city today? What is their use at a time when, for many people, the very concept of utopia has come to an end? Taking a wide perspective on contemporary debates, this paper addresses the general retreat from utopian urbanism in recent years. It connects it with the so–called crisis of modernist urbanism in the capitalist West as well as forms of ‘utopic degeneration’, and assesses some of its implications. Arguing against the abandonment of utopian perspectives, it advocates a rethinking of utopianism through considering its potential function in developing critical approaches to urban questions. The authoritarianism of much utopian urbanism certainly needs acknowledging and criticising, but this need not entail a retreat from imagining alternatives and dreaming of better worlds. Instead, it is necessary to reconceptualise utopia, and to open up the field of utopian urbanism that for too long has been understood in an overly narrow way. The paper suggests the potential value of developing, in particular, modes of critical and transformative utopianism that are open, dynamic and that, far from being compensatory, aim to estrange the taken–for–granted, to interrupt space and time, and to open up perspectives on what might be.
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