Contextualising anticipatory practices

The transition pathways towards sustainable futures are often hindered or even counteracted by exiting systemic barriers (political, economic, and so on). However, at a small scale in our societies, we find rich examples of how creative communities have invented new experimental ways of living, working, and consuming that are eco-friendly and socially just (Manzini, 2015; Meroni, 2007). Sociologists have used terms such as ‘real-utopias’ (Wright, 2010) or ‘micro utopias’ (Wood, 2007) to refer to these examples, since they offer innovative alternatives that are not (yet) deemed plausible or possible at a systemic level. This is because the practices used, for instance in ny housing, energy cooperatives, and critical farming are contextually bound to the ‘hyper local’ and therefore defy up-scaling to prompt systemic change. Nevertheless, real utopias hold potential for ‘de-scaling’ and ‘out-scaling’ in the form of ripple effects that may inspire or provoke other social groups to adapt niche innovations to their own ecologies. In this paper, we present a study of three real utopias found in a European context. First, we demonstrate how real utopias essentially involve the collective enactment of anticipatory practices (Poli, 2019) in combination with design fic on experiments. Secondly, we show that a full understanding of real utopia’s potential for future change rely on a detailed contextual analysis of the interlocking dynamics, resistance and power balances between civic society, state power and capitalist power (Geels, 2014; Wright, 2013). Thirdly, by relating our findings to extant literature, we discuss how the paper contributes to Anticipation on Studies (Celi & Morrison, 2019). Our study will be presented at the conference in the form of three anecdotes that pay special attention on to the social actors, species, organisms, sites and ecologies of each real utopia.