Tag: European Union

IMAJINE: Visions of the Rural in a Globalised World

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In the latest response to the IMAJINE scenarios for the future of European inequality, Professor Esther Peeren of the University of Amsterdam explores the representation of the rural in each scenario, relating these visions back to concerns and challenges in the present day.

Drawing on Donna Haraway’s work, she reminds us that, “Rather than seeking to predict the future or escape from the present, these are ways of ‘staying with the trouble’ in the present, for the future.”

Esther highlights “the dangers inherent to the fantasy of the rural idyll as an isolated paradise shaped by a homogenous community, as well as underlining that such isolated worlds are not exclusive to the rural but may also exist in urban areas and online”; and she reminds us that even when the urban-rural divide seems to be overcome, its inequalities can be displaced “to the global and even interplanetary scale”.

Find Esther Peeren’s response to the IMAJINE scenarios here.

The full IMAJINE scenario set can be found here.

The RURALIMAGINATIONS project “Imagining the Rural in a Globalised World”, which Esther heads, can be found here.

IMAJINE scenario response – Colette Marshall, Director of Operations at Diabetes UK

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“Diabetes is an interesting condition to explore in these scenarios because it’s like the canary in the coal mine. Type 2 diabetes, in particular, tells you the general population health, while Type 1 diabetes tells us about how society is dealing with a smaller group of people who have a condition which is eminently curable or preventable with the right level of research over the next 20 years… So diabetes becomes an interesting bellwether for social inequalities in each scenario, and for good sharing and rollout of the latest advances in healthcare.”

At the IMAJINE project website, Colette Marshall of Diabetes UK explores the future of diabetes, its treatment and management, in each of IMAJINE’s four scenarios for European regional inequality in 2048.

I especially liked Colette’s definition of trust as “confidence that partners will not exploit each other’s vulnerability”. There’s something there that takes us beyond trust in expertise: it’s about mutual recognition of vulnerability, and the motive for action, whether it’s exploitative or not, the power dynamic, which seems highly relevant.

Read more at the IMAJINE website.

IMAJINE: The Future of Food

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What do IMAJINE‘s scenarios for the future of European regional inequality imply for how Europe feeds itself in times to come?

Regional dynamics affect, and are affected by, the agrifood sector and its vital supply chains. Questions of environmental sustainability, logistics, health, and lifestyle are all entwined.

In the IMAJINE project’s latest expert response, Singaporean futurist Luke Tay explores IMAJINE’s four scenarios for Europe in 2048 from a food futures perspective.

IMAJINE: “Levelling up” and the future of media

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The British government has announced its “levelling up” plan to address regional inequalities across the UK.

The IMAJINE project, delivered by a consortium of 16 institutions across 13 countries, investigates questions of inequality and injustice within and between Europe’s nations and regions.

To give us a unique vantage point on what “fair treatment” means for different parts of Europe, the team worked with stakeholders to develop four scenarios for Europe in 2048 (PDF download): SILVER CITADEL, GREEN GUARDIAN, SILICON SCAFFOLD, and PATCHWORK RAINBOW. The scenario set includes responses from experts at the OECD, European Trade Union Institute, Capgemini, UK Space Agency, and many other institutions, exploring the implications for a range of sectors.

One key insight of this process was that it’s never sufficient to merely “run the numbers” when it comes to questions of what is fair or just between regions. We define justice through the stories we tell about what matters to us. Addressing regional inequality is not merely a case of measuring the difference between today’s “haves” and “have-nots”, then seeking to narrow the gap according to today’s metrics. It’s also about understanding what, where, and who we will value, now and in times to come.

The scenarios provide one way of reflecting on those questions of value, and how things are changing compared to the past. SILVER CITADEL sees regional policymakers lobbying centralised bodies for their fair share of an economic “pie” carved up by artificial intelligence. GREEN GUARDIAN explores a climate-ravaged future where Europeans have given up on consumer values and choose to live by new measures of sustainability and wellbeing. In SILICON SCAFFOLD, tech corporations dominate and the nation-state is on the wane, in a world where almost all of our daily life has migrated to privatised virtual spaces. And in PATCHWORK RAINBOW, Europe fragments into a jigsaw of regions with wildly different cultural and social values.

Since the scenarios’ publication in October 2021, we’ve received additional expert commentary from Madeleine Gabriel at Nesta on sustainability implications, the Danish Design Center’s Oskar Stokholm Østergaard on the future of design, and Belgium’s EU Digital Champion Saskia Van Uffelen on how “digital society” might develop in each scenario. And there’s more to come.

The latest expert response, published today, is from Cardiff University’s Caitriona Noonan, and explores what the IMAJINE scenarios mean for the future of media production in Europe. Who will make the content that appears on our screens? How will it be distributed? Caitriona notes that we are at a critical moment for the future of Europe’s film and television sector. IMAJINE’s scenarios offer a unique viewpoint into how that moment is going to play out.

Find out more about IMAJINE at www.imajine-project.eu.

Publication of the IMAJINE Scenarios for the Future of European Regional Inequality

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The four scenarios produced by the Horizon 2020 IMAJINE project to explore the future of European regional inequality have now been published.

The scenarios explore questions of territorial equality – Do EU citizens have equal rights and opportunities regardless of wherever they live? – and spatial justice – Are different places treated fairly? Is your ability to realise your rights compromised by where you live?

Questions of justice are defined socially and narratively – even when a court says it is considering “the balance of probabilities”, it adjudicates between competing stories told by the parties arguing a case. That means we can’t just run the numbers when it comes to the future of inequality, but must explore how notions of fairness and justice might change in times to come – and what those changing notions might tell us about issues in the present.

As Ursula K. Le Guin put it in the quote we chose for IMAJINE’s epigraph, “We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom.”

Each vision of Europe in 2048 offers a different perspective on these issues as they are emerging in the present, and offers an opportunity to reframe the discussion around regional development and inequality. The scenario set includes respondents from a wide range of sectors and institutions around the world, offering further insight into the implications of each scenario.

You can download the IMAJINE scenario document as a PDF from the project website – and there’ll be further updates and expert responses at the IMAJINE homepage as the scenarios are rolled out over the coming months.

Tales of the times to come: the humanities and scenario planning

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“What do the humanities have to offer strategists, policymakers, and decision-takers in the age of the algorithm? As machine intelligence and computational power increase, as we gather ever more data from ever more sources, do the humanities still offer a valuable perspective on times yet to come?”

Over at the website of the Irish Humanities Alliance, Marie Mahon and I have a piece on what our training in the humanities has brought to our work on the IMAJINE project for the future of European regional inequality.

Incoming Storm – Galway, Ireland – August 11, 2008, Wikimedia Commons

Instructions for Inhabiting Imagined Futures

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My short piece “Instructions for Inhabiting Imagined Futures” appears in the 2021 “Bodies and Politics” issue of you are here: the journal of creative geography.

The “Instructions…” emerge from the IMAJINE project exploring the future of European regional inequality. The text experiments with a second-person perspective, inviting the reader to dream themselves into the bodies of four very different figures drawn from early drafts of IMAJINE’s four scenarios for the future of Europe in 2048.

Bird flock in Vedanthangal by Vinoth Chander, CC BY-SA

Read more from you are here at the journal homepage, and you can find out more about the IMAJINE scenarios on this site.

The IMAJINE Project: Scenario Discussions on the Conversation & Ireland’s Moncrieff Show

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Last week, I guested on Sean Moncrieff’s show, broadcast by Ireland’s Newstalk Radio, talking about the IMAJINE project’s scenarios for the future of European regional inequality.

What will the difference between the haves and have-nots of the EU look like a generation from now? IMAJINE’s scenarios present four different, plausible, provocative answers to that question.

You can hear our quarter-hour discussion in its own standalone episode of the Moncrieff podcast, at the Newstalk website, on Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.

NUI Galway’s Marie Mahon and I have also written a short article on the initial IMAJINE scenario sketches, which is up at The Conversation: you can check out “Climate-protected citadels, virtual worlds only for the privileged: is this the future of inequality?” there.

RTÉ Brainstorm: IMAJINE Scenarios for the Future of Europe

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The earliest outputs from the IMAJINE scenario project, which explores the future of the Europe Union, have been released as “sketches”. These are rough drafts of the future contexts we’ll be exploring through the end of this year and into 2021.

Over at the Irish national broadcaster RTÉ’s Brainstorm site, Marie Mahon of the National University of Ireland Galway and I write about four futures that the IMAJINE team started to explore this summer – and where they might take us next.