How will the city of Schwäbisch Gmünd look like in 2050?

The workshop Gmünd 2050, part of the Urban Future Scenarios under Climate Change project, took place in May 2024, at Hochschule für Gestaltung. It was an intensive 4 days workshop with 14 participants who worked together in small groups, producing a total of 4 different Scenarios for the City of Schwäbisch Gmünd in 2050. The main objectives was to speculate about the future of Schwäbisch Gmünd based on a critical assessment of relevant climate change-related reports and a critical overview of current ways of designing made present in the city.

The work done during the workshop can be divided in 4 steps:
Assimilation. Reviewing scientific reports related to climate change and keeping in mind the main elements as support for speculating.
Speculation. Devising multiple possibilities for the future of the city taking into account the expected unfoldings of climate change. The guiding question of this stage is “what if….?”
Imagination. Building a coherent scenario by putting together some of the possibilities envisioned in the previous stage in a single vision. 
Materialization. Materializing the scenario articulating textual and visual elements. For the workshop, this was done following a template divided in 4 section: “Gmünd 2050 in a nutshell”, where the main ideas guiding the scenario were synthetized in short texts and a few images; “News from Gmünd 2050”, presenting headlines, leads and images of relevant facts in a Newspaper simulation; “A day in Gmünd 2050”, showcasing a day in the life of the participants (or a fictional persona) were they to live in 2050 Gmünd;  “Before the end”, an open section, with no rules.

Workshop coordinators
Daniel B. Portugal (State University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
Wandyr Hagge (State University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)