REINVENT hosted an Innovative Session at the Virtual Forum on Earth System Governance that took place 15-17 September.

This session was organised around REINVENT’s Rough Planet Guide to Notterdam 2050 –  a methodological experiment that aims to envision and explore what a decarbonised future would look like. Building upon empirical research on contemporary innovations in industrial production, this “design fiction”—a document which believes itself to be a travel-guide produced thirty years in the future—extrapolates the project findings, combines them with other urban development trends, and makes them the basis for the depiction of a (re)imagined city of northern Europe, as it might be seen by holidaymakers in the mid-21st century.

In this session material from the Guide was first “performed”, followed by discussion of the REINVENT project more broadly, and the methodological territory which the Guide seeks to capture. In the second half of the session, a panel of leading scholars and practitioners discussed the Guide in the context of the “state of the art” in the field, before opening up again to audience questions for a final freewheeling discussion.

More information is available on the Forum’s website.