Intention and Approach

1. To give young people and people in general space to express how they see Brussels in a changing climate context.
2. To link climate action to social realities, including inequality, work, urban life, and systemic change.

From the beginning, the project emphasized imagination not only as a tool for dreaming, but as a way of creating alternatives and sparking conversations that bypass political fatigue or cynicism.

Field research took place in the form of street interviews, youth protest engagement, thematic mappings, and co-designed workshops. Themes such as "Will the climate movement be for everyone?" or "What will community life look like in a climate-changed city?" emerged organically from these conversations.

Participants

Participants were recruited through an open call, distributed through networks of schools, universities, and existing partners. A second workshop series was organized in partnership with a school program.

Participants were mostly young people, students and young professionals, with a mix of activist, artistic, and technical backgrounds. In the process of working together, their varied perspectives on climate and justice converged into shared speculative narratives.

The team deliberately worked with different youth communities, including those not traditionally involved in climate spaces. This helped surface both enthusiasm and skepticism about mainstream environmentalism.

Method

The project unfolded in multiple stages:

• Exploration and dialogue: Gathering questions in the street, mapping themes, collecting visions through video and workshop.
• Building scenario: Creating a future world for Brussels in 2030 based on participants input.
• Scriptwriting: Collectively developing a fictional radio show based on the scenario, with input from participants.
• Artistic production: Performing and recording Brussels Talks, a fictional radio show set in 2030. The final performance included carbon-neutral energy generation by the audience during the show, a symbolic and practical engagement with climate responsibility.

The radio format was chosen for its accessibility and symbolic relevance in shaping public conversations.

Insights

• Imaginative formats like radio and role-play proved more effective than traditional workshops for engaging young people on climate.
• Themes that came out the most were community themes, such as gardening, mutual aid, circular economies, these emerged more strongly than high-tech solutions.
• Tensions arose when a person working for a group funded by a large tech company participated in the radio show. This opened space for critical reflection on alliances and contradictions within climate action spaces.
• Participants were eager to imagine small, concrete changes, like changes in materials, food, and shared practices, which challenged adult facilitators to rethink assumptions about what counts as "real" or "systemic" change.
• One key critique from youth was that some of the future scenarios felt too much like today's solutions projected into the future, suggesting a desire to go beyond incrementalism.

Messages for decision-makers

• Young people want to engage in climate action, but on new terms. Not just protest, but co-creation. Not just demands, but governance and world-building.
• Current institutional frameworks expect youth to adapt to existing systems. This project shows the value of meeting youth where they are, through creative, artistic, and participatory means.
• Artistic formats offer new entry points into climate conversation. They give people something to share, reflect on, and be proud of, a crucial part of creating durable engagement.
• Anger and disillusionment are present, but so is imagination. Youth participants emphasized a need to shift from blame to co-responsibility, including tools like citizen councils to redistribute agency in decision-making.

What worked well:

• Open-ended creative formats (e.g.role-play, radio scripting).
• Scenario building rooted in field research and local realities.
• Using imagination to unlock futures beyond linear thinking.

What could be improved:

• The scriptwriting process was too top-down; youth should have had more say in final outputs.
• Limited resources made artistic production difficult (e.g., underfunding for radio actors).
• The team would have liked to be bolder in world-building, moving beyond today's frames of reference.

Next steps

BrusselAvenir has launched a follow-up project focused on peace futures in Brussels in 2048. This new initiative works with young multimedia artists to explore what a peaceful city could look like—building on the same methodology of participatory storytelling and speculative design.

The legacy of Climate Futures in Brussels 2030 lives on in:

• The radio show itself (Brussels Talks)
• A methodology that can be replicated (imaginative, participatory, cross-sectoral)
• Ongoing interest in future storytelling as a tool for civic and ecological transformation