Speculative Tourism

What is Speculative Tourism?

Speculative Tourism is an international project that operates at the crossroads of science fiction, historical tourism, Augmented Reality and local action project developed by Mushon Zer-Aviv and Shalev Moran. The idea is to enable the creation of new narratives, unleash socio-political imagination and enable participants to reimaging familiar or historical places. Speculative Tourism can be used as an artistic or creative touristic tool as much as a creative element in policy making.

Mushon’s and Shalev’s goal with the project is: “freeing the political imagination, while shedding light on local identities and reacquainting ourselves with our lived environments; we use fiction and speculation to reveal different ways of taking responsibility for our habitats and our future.” You can read more at: https://www.speculativetourism.com/

Speculative Tourism is also an example of how to deploy the other tools and devices described on this site. One part of the methodology used to design the speculative tours is the Four Futures method. Peter Frase developed his four futures method in order to design extreme but possible scenarios for a society after what he thinks will be the inescapable collapse of capitalism as we know it today. Zer-Aviv and Moran adapted this method where two axes are built based on “grand shifts in global conditions”. In Frasers case, these axes described shifts towards either a more equal or hierarchical society, and towards more scarcity or more abundant material conditions. In the case of speculative tourism, this model is extracted without the contents.

How to use Speculative Tourism - a Four Futures example

To begin the exercise, questions about the future are designed matching the aim of the tour which is to be created. This usually begins with a collection of broad questions about the future. When enough are collected, those are identified that have two distinct qualities:

We are truly uncertain of what the future holds for this issue.
We can roughly place the possible answers on an axis between two extremes.

Those “Axes of Uncertainty” as Zer-Aviv and Moran call them, are then crossed to form a matrix. Most workshops have a number of participants that requires people working and writing together. The participants are asked to draw up an axis of uncertainty and then go around to the other participants to share their axis and to try and find a juxtaposition that seems interesting and perhaps surprising. This step helps to identify writing partners who might think of very different questions to one’s own, which in turn can lead to a more fruitful dialog and more robust speculations.The workshop participants go on to imagine how a future society might work under the parameters of each of the four quadrants, starting in broad strokes and big ideas about that future.

“The beautiful thing about the Four Futures method, is that there will always be a quadrant or two that surprises us, that our judgement does not automatically categorize as utopian or dystopian.”

This quadrant is then chosen as the one that is fleshed out in the further course of the workshop using additional methods such as back casting and other creative thinking exercises including story telling methods, world building and other methodologies drawn from the design and teaching work of both creators of this project. The results of the workshops are audio tours, maps and other outputs that offer touristic guidance through the futures created. Since 2017 Shalev and Mushon have created five collections of speculative tourism tours, the latest in Pristina in 2022. The tours can be downloaded via their website https://www.speculativetourism.com/