“To give up hope would be to accept that a desired future is not possible. Without hope, the future would become impossible” (Ahmed 2014:185).
Urban planning frequently involves creating visions of the future city, often as the ‘good’ place. Understanding the city as relational and always in a process of becoming (Massey 2005) suggests it should be amenable to re-imagination. However, changing the city’s physical form is relatively easy compared to changing the social relations, cultural meanings, traditions and norms in which that materiality is embedded (Plate & Rommes 2007). Developing more inclusive cities requires ways of contesting the ‘straightjacket’ of accepted meanings and ways of being and imagine alternatives that give hope for the future. Utopias can be seen as experiments involving “imagination as a method, hope as a motivation, and social change as a goal” (Greenway 2002: 201). Feminist utopian thinking in particular concerns creating new conceptual spaces which open up possibilities for imagining different ways of conceptualising the past, present and future (Sargisson 1996). In the study reported here, transgressing alternatives of imagining the city drawn from feminist science fiction and utopian writings were presented to focus groups of women from different backgrounds in two Swedish cities. The aim was to encourage them to re-imagine their urban subjectivities, challenge the accepted ways of being and picture an ‘other’ city. The women’s visions reflected both acceptance and questioning of the city’s gendered norms and power relations and presented alternative future cities.