Long-term urban planning is no longer a speculative exercise for the next century, but a vital tool for the present. By projecting their vision decades ahead, European municipalities are finding that imagining tomorrow's resilience is the only way to build fairer, safer and more democratic neighbourhoods today.


"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." This is how, in 1984, William Gibson, opening his masterpiece Neuromancer, pictured the city of the future. Two years earlier, a much more famous masterpiece, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, had already put an end to centuries of utopian visions – often marked by flying cars, among all the other wonders – with a dark, rain-drenched, dirty, violent future Los Angeles… still with flying cars, but, well. Not the same thing, admittedly.

For forty years, science fiction and urban planning have walked along this same grey, wet and hyper-connected track, conditioning us to the idea that the future of our cities must inevitably be a technological dystopia in which algorithmic efficiency replaces the empathy of human relationships.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. “That future is already our past,” observes writer and editor Francesco Verso, describing the emergence of solarpunk, a speculative and political movement that tears through the grey clouds of cyberpunk to restore a clean, sunny sky to the centre of the imagination. According to Verso, this narrative effort is about exploring "protopia" — a pragmatic prototyping of the future. “We do not have all the final solutions yet,” he notes, “but we know exactly what the problems are, and we must construct concrete alternatives to the simple dichotomy of being either utopian or dystopian.”

This urgency to change course is pushing many European cities to establish dedicated foresight offices to help shape the future rather than merely enduring it. While standard foresight practices often operate within shorter, more manageable timeframes, the municipality of Alkmaar, in the Netherlands, has chosen an exceptional path, pushing its planning horizon up to 2100 with the Bold City Vision document. This design-research study maps out how the municipality can achieve self-sufficiency in energy, water, food and materials. To drastically reduce its ecological footprint, the study explores and combines three distinct scenarios — technological, natural and cooperative — into a hybrid "Recipro-City" model. By visualising this resilient future, the document acts as a speculative compass, allowing planners to break free from near-term political and regulatory constraints to develop long-term spatial strategiesand stress-test immediate municipal decisions against a 75-year horizon.

For a country that has been fighting against geography for centuries, long-term planning is a survival necessity, as Niek Hendriks, innovation manager for the municipality of Alkmaar, explains: "As a country, we are always struggling with the future because the water is just rising every year and our country is also sinking every year. So there's always future planning, and working together is part of our culture." Hendriks explains that the 2100 horizon has a fundamental psychological and emotional function: twenty-four years from now, we can still imagine what the world will look like, but seventy-five years ahead means three generations from now, a time when our children will be grandparents. It is a vast distance that allows us to open up to new ideas, to be a little more extreme and to think about complex infrastructural, ecological and biological cycles that short-term electoral mandates systematically ignore.

While such an immense temporal distance can sometimes be met with methodological scepticism, Christian Gatard, co-founder of the strategic foresight consultancy Comptoir Prospectiviste, notes that Alkmaar's approach successfully avoids the trap of grand, top-down "cathedral visions" — which are often monumental, theoretical and rigidly authoritarian, in the legacy of Le Corbusier's dogmatic, machine-like urban planning. "Alkmaar’s approach is the one that starts from the bottom, from very concrete practices, with what they call 'small wins', which is very interesting," Gatard observes. " Recalling the thoughts of philosopher Bruno Latour, he notes that to truly land in the future, we must begin with the people on the territory.

A concrete example of starting from the territory lies in the way cities manage their data. In speculative dystopias, virtual space is typically depicted as a place of surveillance and confinement. Francesco Verso argues that we have lost true ownership and agency over our devices, comparing the modern smartphone to a locked system where users can no longer repair, modify or truly understand the hardware. Instead of being active creators, we are reduced to passive consumers confined within proprietary corporate pathways: "It is a locked system, a closed black box where we can do nothing but use a few emojis," he says. Alkmaar has sought to overturn this paradigm by applying the technology of thedigital twin, a virtual 3D replica of the city that is offered to citizens on an open-source basis. Through what Hendriks defines as "reverse participation," the municipality has chosen to "let the citizens collect the data and collect the problems where you want to steer as a city because in that way you can actually build towards a future as a society, and they have the ownership of the information." Residents can thus install their own sensors to measure noise, monitor heat islands or report missing pets, transforming the digital twin into an interactive play area that restores bargaining power and neighbourhood democracy to local communities.

But a symbiotic city — conceived as an organic ecosystem where technology, nature and humanity exist in mutual support rather than resource extraction — cannot be a closed ecosystem, nor can it be an exclusive club for the affluent. The risk that the ecological transition translates into a form of "green gentrification" is one of the great unresolved issues of our time. Francesco Verso introduces a key political distinction between the environmental sensibilities of the West and those of the Global South, explaining that "hope is a bit of a privilege of those who can afford to hope. In the Global South, in India, in China, in Latin America, hope is reduced to desperation, and change is felt as something that cannot be postponed; it has to be done today, with the resources and skills they have." This necessity dictates looking at high-efficiency, low-tech and low-cost solutions, which are already serving as embryonic blueprints for the future city. An extraordinary example is Il Salotto di Miranda in Turin. Rather than a simple urban garden, it represents a microscopic prototype of the 2050 neighbourhood: a collective of young people has created an urban greenhouse equipped with a small language model — a local artificial intelligence system running on a twenty-euro Raspberry Pi, calibrating its entire energy consumption on a single solar panel or a bicycle. In the future symbiotic city, these low-cost, self-sufficient technological nodes could replace centralised, high-emission data centres, turning every neighbourhood into an autonomous, climate-resilient oasis where innovation ceases to be an expensive luxury and becomes a shared, community-scale infrastructure.

This vision aligns closely with the battle fought by Martha Myers, Senior Global Organiser at 350.org and former coordinator of the European Right to Energy coalition, who has spent more than a decade fighting for energy as a fundamental human right. When mapping out the path to this future, Myers emphasises a near-term focus: "I often do this exercise with organisers. Imagine it's 2030 and we've achieved it. Climate justice has happened. You open your front door. What does it feel like?" For her, the transition cannot be a slow, distant promise, but must start with a radical rethinking of what a city owes its people. "For me, the perfect city is not only about a peaceful space," Myers points out. "It’s about resilience. How do we create infrastructure that provides affordable and clean water, energy and food? How do we make infrastructure that meets people's needs for education, care and community? These are great questions to ask our partners, neighbours or friends." To answer these challenges, Myers advocates for actionable, community-driven policies: establishing democratic energy cooperatives that actively involve marginalised groups, utilising municipal subsidies to shield low-income residents and integrating local energy grids into public housing. For Myers, positive energy districts (PEDs) must serve as a concrete "social shield" to protect vulnerable households from energy price shocks and the risk of displacement caused by green upgrades. This vision has found practical application in Alkmaar through the European project POCITYF, where the municipality cooperated with local social housing corporations to retrofit and upgrade public housing complexes while freezing rents, ensuring that the financial savings from local energy production benefit low-income tenants directly.

Ultimately, as Francesco Verso suggests, the path is not an unreachable utopia, but a pragmatic responsibility: "I believe we should move at least towards the currently best solution, which is not the panacea for all problems, but which at least detaches you from the worst possible one." This pragmatism rests on a single ethical axis: "care is the cure.""We don't take care of our neighbours, we don't take care of the elderly, we don't take care of the most vulnerable," Verso reflects, pointing to mutual community care as the only way out. Embracing this collective care is how we finally tear William Gibson's sky away from the dead-channel grey of passive consumption. By reclaiming the scale of the neighbourhood, democratic resource management and local energy autonomy, we can finally turn our gaze upwards — toward an urban sky tuned not to the void of dystopia, but to the warm light of the sun. With or without flying cars.

Suggested Reading: Key Voices of the Solarpunk Movement

To delve deeper into the speculative and ecological landscapes of solarpunk, Francesco Verso recommends the following authors, theorists and works, which offer essential perspectives on how we can actively prototype our ecological futures:

• Andrew Dana Hudson: An American author whose novella Our Shared Storm (2022) is widely considered one of the most sophisticated narrative and academic explorations of climate fiction. His first translated anthology in Italian is Lo stato solare (Future Fiction).
• Francesco Verso: Italian editor and author who has edited solarpunk anthologies across China, the UK, Peru, and Bulgaria. His speculative contributions include novels such as I Camminatori (The Walkers), Chimeriade, Ecoluzione, and the graphic novel Guida prima e un po' comic(a) al solarpunk.
• Vandana Singh: An Indian physicist and writer based in the US. A leading voice in climate fiction and solarpunk from the Global South, her novella Entanglement and various short stories explore systemic, interconnected climate solutions.
• Eric Hunting: Futurist, designer, and essayist whose seminal paper Solarpunk: Post-Industrial Design and Aesthetics remains a cornerstone text for understanding the movement's material and visual philosophy.
• Ana Sun: A Malaysian writer living in the UK, known for stories that merge ecology, mythology, and community. Her upcoming debut collection of short stories is scheduled for publication soon.
• Sarena Ulibarri: An American editor and author who has curated several foundational solarpunk anthologies in the US, playing a pivotal role in shaping the genre's early landscape.
• Becky Chambers: An acclaimed American science fiction author whose optimistic "cosy sci-fi" and hopepunk novels (Monk and Robot series) portray gentle, constructive, and community-centric futures.
• Jay Springett: Cultural theorist, consultant and creator of the solarpunk portal Aneris, who hosts podcasts and writes extensively on the intersections of technology, ecosystem resilience, and collective narratives.

Article by Selene Verri

Photo by Peerapon Chantharainthron from Unsplash

Contacts:
Project coordinator:
João Cravinho – EDP
joao.cravinho@edp.pt

Communication Secretariat:
info@pocityf.eu

Project website: https://pocityf.eu
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/pocityf/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfINly2sme7pxYOm8n2Z1Dw?view_as=subscriber