I use walks as a futures method because they tend to surface hope, but not the kind that relies on reassurance or positive thinking.
Optimism often skips too quickly to conclusions. It smooths over tension. It looks for signals that “things will work out.” In futures work, that can be dangerous. It can bypass power, ignore loss, and rush groups toward comforting narratives rather than honest ones.
Walking does something different.
When people move through a place together, they encounter complexity that can’t be abstracted away. They see aging infrastructure beside new interventions. Care alongside neglect. Adaptation alongside fragility. The future doesn’t appear as a promise. It appears as a mix. That mix is where hope lives.
Hope, unlike optimism, doesn’t require certainty. It doesn’t ask us to believe that things will be fine. It asks us to stay present to what is unfinished. On a walk, hope emerges when participants notice small acts of care, quiet resilience, informal adaptations, or contested spaces that could still become otherwise.
These are not guarantees. They are openings. Walking slows people down enough to register those openings without inflating them. It grounds imagination in reality: in bodies, weather, textures, histories. It becomes possible to say: this is hard, and something else might still be possible here.
That’s the kind of hope futures work needs. Not optimism about outcomes, but commitment to staying with uncertainty, complexity, and possibility long enough for new futures to be imagined responsibly.