FutureEverything releases the video of the Manchester conference session
The video of Cities: Urban Play, one of the sessions of the FutureEverything Conference 2014 in Manchester, is now available. The conference is part of FutureEverything Festival, held from 27 March to 1 April 2014 under the theme Tools for Unknown Futures.
The session brings together Zuloark, Holly Gramazio, Paul Graham Raven and Liam Young to think about the city through play, fiction, speculation and new forms of urban imagination. The video description presents the conversation as a gathering of urbanists mapping geographies of the fantastic, together with voices connected to speculative engineering, design, architecture and future narratives.
For Urban Rights, this session expands the role of the Parliament of Urban Rights within FutureEverything. The project appears not only as a wooden architecture built within City Fictions, but also as part of the conference programme. If the Parliament operates in NOMA as the town hall of a temporary city —a space open to neighbourhood meetings, assemblies and civic conversations—, Cities: Urban Play places that experience within a broader debate on how urban futures can be rehearsed.
The Parliament proposes a way of playing seriously with the city. It is not about imagining closed futures, but about building devices where anyone can sit, speak, listen and contest which rights should organise common space. In Manchester, the Universal Declaration of Urban Rights intersects with digital culture, speculative fiction and playful practices to open a concrete question: what urban institutions do we need for futures we do not yet know?
Writer Paul Graham Raven later reflects on the session in Futurismic, connecting it to the relationship between science fiction, urbanism and futures. In his reading, utopias do not work as fixed blueprints for a perfect world, but as spaces for testing other possibilities. That is also the strength of the Parliament: a minimal infrastructure for collectively rehearsing the city that might come.
Audiovisual archive: Cities: Urban Play – FutureEverything Conference 2014
Identified participants: Zuloark, Holly Gramazio, Paul Graham Raven, Liam Young
Festival: FutureEverything 2014