Roundtable discussion based on Places of Hope: how a heterotopic intervention made the future present

Prof. dr. Maarten Hajer Maarten is distinguished professor Urban Futures and Director of the Urban Futures Studio of Utrecht University. He will reflect upon the paper “Places of Hope: how a heterotopic intervention made the future present” that Wytske Versteeg, Jesse Hoffman and himself wrote together. High modernist policy making seems unable to respond adequately to the mounting climate disruption, which has led to calls for a reimagination of democratic institutions (Dryzek & Pickering 2019; Mert 2019; Tremmel 2019; cf Hajer & Versteeg 2019). The paper discusses a practical example of reimagining, with which all three authors were closely involved: the Dutch transdisciplinary intervention Places of Hope. Places of Hope was an exhibition focused on the spatial future of the Netherlands, commissioned by the Dutch government. In an address the Minister for the Interior stated: By giving the commission for this exhibition (...) the national government leaves its traditional role and consciously searches for other actors with which to share knowledge and solutions. Places of Hope consisted of a parade, an exhibition, a series of events and collaborative sessions for stakeholders in a depoliticized setting, intended to explore ways to give citizens a renewed 'appetite for the future'. It was open from April until November 2018 and attracted 12.646 officially registered visitors. Post hoc evaluations show that the manifestation had a lasting positive impact on the majority of its visitors, who ranged from vulnerable citizens to high-level policymakers.

The paper reflects on the evaluations the authors received and seeks to theorize the role of exhibitions like Places of Hope and speculate on its future potential. According to Raymond Williams (1989: 4), ‘[t]he making of a society is a finding of common meanings and directions, and its growth is an active debate and amendment under the pressures of experience, contact and discovery, writing themselves into the land.’ A society leaning too much on what is already known runs the risk of losing its ability to adapt to new challenges, whereas a failure to connect new meanings with already existing structures might critically damage the ability to perceive, let alone work towards, a common good.

The authors argue that the imaginative and relational quality of transdisciplinary interventions such as Places of Hope can play a crucial role in this regard. Ideally, they act as heterotopias (Foucault 1967), existing in close connection to policy circles yet providing a sheltered space within which relations that are typically taken for granted can be suspended and reinvented. This allows for temporary changes in social roles and for a postponement of usually entrenched binaries such as ideal/real, future/past, nature/culture, public/private and body/mind, as we will show building on visitors' reactions to Places of Hope. Interventions such as PoH thus allow space for political experimentation and engagement with a joint future which cannot be found in routine forms of citizen participation or in the often cognitively oriented practices of the conventional science-policy interface of environmental politics.