The Skinny publishes FutureEverything 2014: Tools for the Unknown Future, a review by Ali Gunn of the visual arts programme of FutureEverything 2014, held in Manchester from 27 March to 1 April. The article presents the festival as a “festival as laboratory”, a space where art, technology, music and science come together to open a dialogue around possible futures.
From the perspective of Urban Rights, this context is especially relevant. The Parliament forms part of this practicable urban fiction: a temporary infrastructure for gathering, talking and debating urban rights within a city under rehearsal. If City Fictions imagines tools for unknown futures, the Parliament proposes one of them: a common space to discuss how the city is built, regulated and inhabited.
The Skinny review closes by pointing to one of the festival’s central ideas: the need for an open source and collaborative society, where ideas, methods and tools are shared so that people can take part in managing their digital, social, political and urban futures. This reading connects directly with the Universal Declaration of Urban Rights: opening the city as an archive, as a debate and as a collective construction.