Prefiguring viable futures in the everyday

This paper frames participatory practices in urban neighborhoods as prefiguring viable alternative futures at the scale of everyday life. Narratives around sustainable futures are often dominated by technocratic and market-driven solutions on one hand, and top-down managerial governance from authorities on the other, which ultimately seek as far as possible to maintain 'business as usual'. Against this, everyday practices in self-organized spaces offer genuinely transformative potential by allowing participants to 'act otherwise' in the present, expressing their needs and desires around how to live together in the future. With the understanding that a post-growth, post-consumerist society will require a reconceptualization of what constitutes 'the good life' (Soper, 2020), there is a need to explore and demonstrate how such futures may look and feel in everyday life.

Drawing on ethnographic research in self-organized 'buurthuiskamers' (neighborhood living rooms) in the Netherlands, this paper reads these collective spaces as generating possible urban futures by experimenting with new forms of sociality, sharing, production and consumption. Given the space to 'act otherwise', what do people choose to do, and what can we learn from this in conceiving and planning for viable future cities? Rather than measuring 'viability' within current systems or market paradigms, prefigurative practices pursue viability through, on the one hand, being directly derived from citizens' everyday needs, desires, and dissatisfactions with the status quo (Jeffrey and Dyson, 2022) and on the other, being demonstrably manifested in real time and space; both immediately tangible and generative of new concepts and possibilities (Cooper, 2014).

Cooper, D. (2014) 'Everyday Utopias: the conceptual life of promising spaces'. Durham: Duke University Press
Soper, K. (2020) 'Post-Growth Living: for an alternative hedonism'. London: Verso
Jeffrey, C. and Dyson, J. (2022) 'Viable geographies', Progress in Human Geography, 46(6), pp 1331-1348