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The background presentation from the kick off workshop 21st of march 2024

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Planetary Dreaming is sponsered by Becket Foundation and the Danish Art Foundation.

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The starting point for Planetary Dreaming is that we're facing one of humanity's biggest transitions, requiring us to prepare for entirely new conditions of existence. On the one hand, this involves facing the challenges without denying the current situation. On the other hand, it entails developing visions of a world worth dreaming of.
Our perspective here at the Academy, and which is also the basic idea behind Planetary Dreaming, is that designers, architects, and artists have an important role to play in addressing the challenges we are currently facing.

Because designers, architects, and artists possess not only the ability to imagine what does not yet exist. They also have the methods and tools to create concrete images and scenarios of new and alternative ways the world can be shaped.

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Several researchers have highlighted that among the various crises we are face, perhaps the most significant one is a crisis of imagination. It appears that we have lost the ability to imagine a world different from the one currently existing.

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And here, we believe that designers and architects have a fundamental role in envisioning recognizable and clear scenarios for shaping the world in new, sustainable ways.

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Historically, designers and architects have always influenced decision-makers and other key societal actors.

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From the grand visions of the interwar period…

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…to the post-war reflections, which focused on exploring the approaches, abilities, and capacities that can underlie new ways of thinking about the world - as philosopher Nelson Goodman called 'Ways of Worldmaking.'

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In Denmark, this approach to envisioning new worlds was realized through the materialization of the BOLD societal vision articulated in Jens Otto Krag's blueprint for Future Denmark. Written during a time of global conflict, widespread poverty, and social inequality in Denmark, the book presented a vision not just of another society, but a COMPLETELY different society-one that would later become the welfare state and a society unlike any seen before.

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But we must also acknowledge that this welfare society has become a society that in many ways is an unsustainable society. Therefore, we need a new bold societal thinking. And where our viewpoint is that designers and architects have the opportunity to help create new radical visions for a sustainable welfare society in a sustainable world, and where Denmark also naturally once again may have the opportunity to lead the way.

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The fundamental question behind our initiative is therefore, how can we develop new visions for a more sustainable future for our organizations and society, with architecture and design as central pillars? In essence, this is the core of the artistic process: To call the 'not yet known' into existence.

That is why art has the ability to radically affect us and change our perspectives and values. And it is understood both as the ability to imagine what does not yet exist - as fantasy, dreams, and ideas of another or better world. But obviously also as connecting to 'something greater,' a higher purpose.

Therefore, our goal is to interconnect the often goal-oriented and rational perspectives we find in our normal development processes with the much more open and diffuse perspective that characterize the condition of being? How might we design differently if, in the moment of making, we also experience ourselves as part of a much larger system within which our activities unfold?

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At a practical level, we are also actively exploring how to establish interdisciplinary collaborations with professionals from various fields, as well as with private and public stakeholders.
Our goal is to foster shared understanding of the risks and challenges we encounter, and to develop new collective visions that can inspire action and mobilization. What obstacles do we encounter, and how can we overcome them?

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With the overarching planetary perspective, our aim is to move away from assigning ourselves a specific civilizational role as citizens, population, or consumers and instead focus on what we see as the core of the challenge we face:

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That humans currently hold the leading role in the sixth mass extinction event in the billion-year history of the planet. However, for the first time in history, there is a species present that is aware of what is happening.

Therefore, we are concerned with how we can shift the focus from ourselves as individuals, organizations, or nations, to see ourselves as a species - 'humanity' distributed over the surface of the planet, and thus the, from a historical perspective, probable projections of our actions?

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Therefore, the key question is: Is it possible to establish a new framework for working with possible futures for the Earth concerning humanity?

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Here, a central point for us is that we cannot tackle the challenges we face without, on some level, being able to unite around what we, in the absence of a better term, could call a 'unified we' - humanity.

And this is not about developing new simple universal historical interpretations of the past in order to outline uniform collective visions for the future.
There is obviously a need for personal freedom, and that all experiences, realms of experience, and dreams should be valid,

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But from a planetary perspective, we as humanity are also in the process of destroying it all, and seen from a polar bear's perspective, we are humans (period).  

Our goal with Planetary Dreaming is therefore that we want to move away from solely viewing humanity as a function (citizen, population, or consumer) and instead see what the polar bear sees.

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Therefore, Planetary Dreaming is primarily about how, from a planetary perspective, we can envision new futures for the globe. And that with an acknowledgment of our unique ability as humans to be both conscious and creative.  

At the same time, we also need to incorporate more perspectives - more power perspectives - if you will.  

And here the big challenge is, how we as humans can come to "negotiate" on behalf of the planet. Because we are always, in a sense, proxies, we make translations for plants, animals, and rivers that do not speak for themselves. Jellyfish or deer do not write books or develop strategic plans - but they have another, equally real presence in the world.  

The overarching question therefore is how we can handle both the privilege and the burden of being responsible for correcting the damage we have caused - and the fact that we are currently tasked with cleaning up after our own mess, as philosopher Timothy Morton has put it.

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Unfortunately, at the moment, there is very little action within the pyramids - in the large organizations and political institutions. Politicians currently seem to lack the courage to act beyond the mandate they receive from the population, and within the population, there is unfortunately still a lot of climate skepticism.

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At the same time, we also know from studies in diffusion theory that when just 10-12% of a population has the desire for change, there begins to be political and societal responsiveness that can lead to structural transformations.  

In diffusion theory, we refer to this as 'tipping point theory.' Therefore, working towards a 'tipping point' towards a sustainable society is worthwhile.  

The trends, movements, and voices that have driven major changes in recent years have come from civil society. Think of #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, and #FridaysForFuture, which have rapidly grown to global significance and have created real change.  

In the movement towards a more sustainable society, we need to rethink hierarchies, decision-making structures, and power.

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In Planetary Dreaming, we work with two levels of approaches: System Acupuncture and Worldmaking.

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The concept of system acupuncture is about small catalytic interventions.

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System acupuncture can be implemented as either micro-actions or more organized interventions. And also at different levels, it functions as a top-down effort - from top to bottom, across, or bottom-up.  

The point regarding systems theory is that if these initiatives mature sufficiently, and if there are enough of them, they can challenge established systems and push towards a tipping point.

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And it can become ecologies of interventions.
The questions we are concerned with are whether it is possible in this way to develop a self-growing infrastructure with new models of governance, new forms of leadership, new decision-making systems, and new ways of involving citizens and the population.  

Could it in this way be possible to weave a new societal fabric that can pull the rug out from under the old society? We are already each engaged in making interventions at different levels, and can they become the basis for coordinating more and new common initiatives that can set a movement in motion?

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The second approach we work with is world-making, including storytelling and universe creation, which has been humanity's oldest tool for creating meaning and coherence, both in reflecting on the past, but also in forming visions of the future.
Just as our ancestors dreamed of new worlds when they set out over the sea, we would like to initiate a process that is about how we can begin to gather around other ways the world can look and be. How can we create new worlds of quality of life within the planetary boundaries? What kind of people will inhabit the planet in 30, 50, 100, or 200 years?
In the Climate Expedition, it is formulated that we must go out and search for our lost future. A future that we have no idea what it looks like, but which we have the opportunity to create - if we can dream it up.