Making our cities sustainable for an uncertain climatic future is a central focus of urban studies. Sustainable urbanism (also called eco-urbanism), experimental urbanism and postcolonial urbanism are all types of future urbanisms. Future urbanisms’ research, in different ways, examines what governance, infrastructures, materiality and social practices are required to radically transform urban spaces (Hodson and Marvin, 2010; Caprotti et al., 2015; Joss, 2015). There is also considerable research examining the processes of these transformations - the how of necessary social, political and economic change (Karvonen et al., 2018). Concurrently, but distinct from this research, is a growing body of work on eco-communities, intentional communities and utopian studies (Litfin, 2014; Jarvis, 2014; Sargisson, 2012). Eco-communities research is also examining how people are generating new ways of living, often through self-building, self-provisioning, and self-constructing off-grid infrastructures (Pickerill, 2015, 2016).

The first goal of this residency is to bring into dialogue these two distinct strands of research (future urbanisms and eco-communities) to extend and strengthen understandings of the potential ecological future of cities. Future urbanisms needs work on eco-communities to think more expansively and creatively about urban ecological futures, to incorporate more emphasis on collective self-organised initiatives, to more critically engage in issues of scalar diversity and global examples, to examine more actually-existing examples and explore the interdependencies of everyday needs (housing, livelihoods, education, consumption and production). The second goal is to integrate more critical questions about who is shaping these future visions, and therefore who is excluded. This draws upon important work on the role of children in future urban design (Horton et al., 2015; Christensen et al. 2017), of women and non-white communities in fostering urban resourcefulness (Derickson et al. 2015), and on marginalised others, such as those with different bodily (dis)abilities (Bhakta and Pickerill, 2016).