SUrF will be conducted in 3 key phases:
SUrF
Speculative Urban Futures (SUrF) is a pedagogical project that investigates the role and purpose of design in the 21st century – understood as an ecology of knowing, imagining and making that is deeply involved in the complex worlding dynamics that shape contemporary urban reality. The project aims to develop, test and share a host of new design methods and pedagogical tools that may help us foster the conditions needed to achieve key reforms and meaningful, fundamental changes that are necessary to align design with some of the demands and challenges of the twenty-first century.
In short, based on speculative design approaches in situated urban settings, SUrF focuses on the development of new design methodologies and epistemologies that may guide us towards mitigating existing environmental devastation as well as building other worlds. These will exist as five pilot packages that encompass all the educational materials required to replicate each course in other academic, civic and corporate contexts.
In short, based on speculative design approaches in situated urban settings, SUrF focuses on the development of new design methodologies and epistemologies that may guide us towards mitigating existing environmental devastation as well as building other worlds. These will exist as five pilot packages that encompass all the educational materials required to replicate each course in other academic, civic and corporate contexts.
- Phase 1: Develop and test five pilot projects (one per institution) with students (various project durations and levels of students).
- Phase 2: Exchange the pilot project with another institution for further testing and iteration (experimenting with durations and levels of students).
- Phase 3: Package the final version of the pilot as a sharable brief and disseminate for use at other institutions.
SUrF is an educational project funded by Erasmus+, the European Union programme for education, training, youth and sport, with the aim of strengthening design education by collecting and exchanging existing knowledge and experience while developing new methods in the field of design.
Activities
Situation Room
As part of the exhibition ‘How to design a revolution: the Chilean way to design,’ in which the operations room of the Cybersyn project is reconstructed, we propose a performative activity of urban experimentation called “Situation Room.” This initiative is part of the European project SUrF – Speculative Urban Futures, and takes as a reference both the operations room and the potential of the body as a tool to rethink the urban space. The proposal arises from a speculative scenario where 70% of the population would be more than 65 years old, and focuses on the intergenerational dynamics as a key to imagining new housing, cohabitation, and urban design models.
Presentation of SUrF at Setmanes d’Arquitectura festival
The Setmanes d’Arquitectura festival has hosted in the programming of its 2025 edition a session of debate and presentation of the research project Speculative Urban Futures (SUrF). The session was celebrated on June 25 from 11:00 am to 2:00 pm. This activity is free and open to the general public upon registration.