Langugae SWITCH
As part of the project What Kind of Cities Do We Want? Contemporary Transformations of Urban Visions, Practices and Ethics (NextGenerationEU, 2024–2027), we are establishing
the FUTURUS Centre for Urban Futures – a hub for research on urban challenges, connecting stakeholders, and co-creating our shared urban futures.
Today, cities are confronted with a multitude of challenges. More than half of the world’s population resides in urban environments, where transformations are accelerating as a result of migration, climate change, wars and disasters, shifting economies, tourism, digital technologies, and new forms of labor and governance. These dynamics affect people’s lives and everyday urban life.
In shaping our shared urban futures, we recognize the importance of collaboration, dialogue, and networking among members of the academic community, the economic sector, civic and artistic associations and initiatives, experts, creative individuals, and policymakers. With this in mind, we established the FUTURUS Centre to foster cities that are more inclusive, sustainable, just, and resilient.
While urban futures are often framed through technology and design, the FUTURUS Centre highlights the value of a humanistic perspective, rooted in qualitative methodologies and approaches. By focusing on people, we aim to hear the voices of different urban communities, understand their everyday practices and needs, and encourage greater social responsibility.
Through the citymaking.eu network platform, the FUTURUS Centre acts as an international hub connecting projects, institutions, associations, and individuals, encouraging dialogue, collaboration, research, and the sharing of knowledge and inspiration.
The FUTURUS Centre operates through the citymaking.eu network platform as an international hub connecting projects, institutions, associations, and individuals, fostering mutual exchange of information, collaboration, research, and empowerment.
VISION of the FUTURUS Centre
At the FUTURUS Centre, we envision a world where urban governance is shaped through dialogue with interdisciplinary and applied research.
We foster collaboration among scholars, independent researchers, policymakers, and civic and artistic initiatives to jointly create knowledge and solutions, strengthening the role of research in city governance and ensuring that urban futures are co-create knowledge and solutions, strengthening the role of research in urban governance and ensuring that urban futures are inclusive, sustainable, and collectively shaped by diverse communities.
At the FUTURUS Centre, we aim to be proactive and engaged partners in shaping urban policies. We strive to rethink how urban challenges are understood and addressed, helping to make cities more dynamic, resilient, just, and future-oriented for generations to come.
MISSION of the FUTURUS Centre
At the FUTURUS Centre, we focus on several key objectives:
Comparative approach: conducting research across diverse urban contexts to better understand trends, multiple futures, and the dynamics of power that influence them.
Innovative methodologies: developing ethnographies of the future, experimental qualitative methods, and transdisciplinary research approaches.
Global collaboration and knowledge exchange: fostering connections among researchers, practitioners, and policymakers worldwide to exchange insights and best practices.
Public engagement: encouraging civic participation in shaping urban futures through discussions and public events.
Inclusive, just, and sustainable cities: streghtening marginalized voices, nurturing an ethics of solidarity and care, and participation in urban governance.
Education and future literacy: encouraging future-oriented thinking and action through educational programs, workshops, and public discourse across all levels of society.
Public policy and governance: integrating research-based knowledge in urban policy-making, advising on public decision-making processes, improving communication between different governance levels and citizens, and jointly creating long-term urban visions.
ACTIVITIES
At the FUTURUS Centre, we initiate, implement, and support diverse forms of collaboration, dissemination, and knowledge transfer through consultations, workshops, public forums, projects, teaching activities, policy guidelines, artistic interventions, festivals, guest lectures, summer schools, and educational programs.
CITIES involved in our ongoing research projects and collaborations include: Hvar (CRO), Koper (SLO), Kutina (CRO), Ljubljana (SLO), Maribor (SLO), Novska (CRO), Nova Gorica (SLO), Rijeka (CRO), Zagreb (CRO), Petrinja (CRO).
THEMES we explore:
The FUTURUS Centre emerged from a collaboration between the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research (Croatia) and the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (Slovenia). The Centre was envisioned in 2019 and developed within the bilateral project Urban Futures: Imagining and Activating Futures in Unsettled Times (HRZZ–ARIS, 2020–2024). It has been realized within the framework of the projects What Kind of Cities Do We Want? Contemporary Transformations of Urban Visions, Practices and Ethics (NextGenerationEU, 2024–2027) and What Is Urgent? European Urban Climate Neutrality Policy and Its Local Interpretations (Weave, 2024–2028).
