People are often fascinated when I tell them that I often incorporate walks and place in my futures work. I do this because some futures can’t be accessed sitting still, and because “places” matter to us.
Movement changes how people think. Walking slows conversations down while opening them up. It’s an embodied approach that equalises participants, creates pauses, and allows reflection to happen sideways rather than head-on.
Place adds another layer.
When futures work happens in real environments, streets, landscapes, buildings, thresholds, imagination becomes grounded. This is particularly true of places, physical locations that mean something to people in the group (although it’s possible to use other physical locations as a provocation or conversation-starter). When futures are grounded in place and explored on foot, people stop talking about “the future” in general and start noticing how change lands “here”: on this path, in this neighbourhood, for these people.
Walks invite the body into the conversation. They bring in memory, emotion, and sensory information that are usually excluded from strategic work, but deeply shape how decisions are made.
For me, place-based futures work is about relationship. Relationship to environment, to the past and present, to one another. It’s also about share experience. This tackles the psychological distance that often blocks us from taking steps to change systems: spatial, temporal, social, and experiential.
By working with walks and place in my futures programmes, “the future” becomes less of a distant abstraction and more of something we are already standing inside, and therefore still able to shape.
(If you’re curious about how I work with walking and place, you might be interested in my Walk the Futures research, and my Ways to Walk experiments.)