TURNTON

The world is not looking good. Pollution levels have boomed, ocean ecosystems have collapsed, the land, the water and the air are filled with poisons emitted freshly or a century ago. Climate change, the result of a decidedly lax response to warnings and evidence, has begun with momentum, weather extremes are commonplace with floods, droughts and the heaviest storms we can imagine. The coastal regions have gone from being the beautiful playgrounds of the rich to dangerous abandoned zones suffering from rotting algae and the decomposing bodies of a few fish in the collapsing ecosystems as jellyfish and slimes take hold.

The implications of the careless misuse and manipulation of ecological systems have come home to roost, a climax disaster appears unavoidable. In Turnton, Time's Up proposes that humanity responds to this ecological dystopia with sociopolitical utopic changes. Starting with a question of how luxury might be defined and perceived three decades from now, we developed a melding of several emergent positive opposition proposals in order to undermine the ecological slide.

That means that we take on the slogan “Change was our only chance” as something serious, that is not just something done by small groups trying to “prove a point” but becomes normal, widespread behaviour. Cooperation replacing Competition, the learnt behaviour of homo economicus moving to homo reciprocans, the cooperative human. A world where the reality denying mantras of neoliberalism and unconstrained growth are replaced by the maxims of mutualism, where free trade is moderated to support crucial social goals without falling into some nationalistic protectionism, where economics is about a better world and a better life.

Economic success undergoes another transformation, with a fair and resource respecting satisfaction of human needs and wants as the primary focus, quality of life and the common wealth as its goals. Sustainability in raw materials, energy and transport, trade, production and work practices orbit around the poles of environmental protection, human rights, distribution fairness and working standards. Thus migration becomes a nonissue, transnational settlement and mobility are normal and well organised, new arrivals are welcomed and included as new neighbours. Not only ecological but also cultural, social and economic diversity is recognised as an asset, nothing is too big to fail and experiments are welcome.

In brief, alternative solutions that had spent the last decades being ridiculed, as being politically, economically or technically utopic, unimplementable or naïve, have gained the upper hand in Turnton.

Without doubt, the image of the docklands and city of Turnton and the surrounding society in this speculative future is incomplete and that is fine: we are not offering a prognosis, only a proposal. We mix and match concepts and signals that we know about with a playful portion of fabulation and poetic speculation in order to obtain a possibility that we find interesting and worth thinking about.

We prefer to look into the preferable and not just the pessimistic probable, to imagine a future worth living in, in spite of all that might befall us, a good life for all. We invite an audience to join us in imagining more parts of the incomplete picture.