In light of today's polycrisis, there is a need for positive visions of the future in public political discourse in order to reduce the current massive uncertainty among both citizens and the parties that support democracy. The starting point for this pro bono project is the assumption that researchers who deal with pressing technological, ecological, or social challenges day in and day out will generally have some idea of the better world they want to create with their research. These ideas can motivate people to courageously set out to help realize such a vision. 

The project focuses on such sustainability utopias as positive but realistically unattainable visions of the future in the context of numerous scientific disciplines and individual subjects, rather than on all-encompassing, society-wide utopias. Since utopias are hardly the subject of scientific discourse itself, and since such discourse is largely opaque to the public anyway, existing utopias have not yet been made available to the general public either as mental models or as guides for action. 

The project therefore identifies a large number of existing sustainability utopias, from, by and for Lower Saxony, and makes them available in an easily accessible form as video podcasts. Its aim is to encourage us not to see ourselves merely as passive victims of our fate in an increasingly chaotic world, but to believe in the possibility of a better world and, ideally, to actively try to create one ourselves.

Concept and implementation: Prof. Dr. Christian Busse and Julien Minnemann, M.A.

Implementation period: Q4/2024 to Q4/2025 (planned)

The videos can be viewed on YouTube.