Fueling Up Desirable Futures
Task
To create a set of hopeful visualizations of how a car-free future may look like.
As more and more cars will go electric or simply disappear, gas stations will become ruins of a happily forgotten past. In this context, this project’s aim is to depict desirable, inclusive and life-driven scenarios in our cities. It explores how gas stations, as the living symbols of the climate crisis in our cities, can be repurposed and collectivised in order to give back and heal the wound they’ve helped creating in both our ecology and our societies.
Design Connects at the Neues Museum Nürnberg explores how design can help us navigate social and environmental challenges. Our project couldn’t be more aligned with the exhibition, offering a practical, imaginative take on how familiar urban spaces could be rethought for a more sustainable future. Creating inspiring narratives of the future is at the core of what we do, and Fuealing Up Desirable Futures brought a clear, optimistic perspective to the museum’s broader conversation about where design can take us next.
Besides from its materialization for Neues Museum Nürnberg, the original project consists on a set of five gas stations from that now serve a different function: from urban farming and rewilding practices to social hubs, collectively owned workshops or waste management infrastructures. This time, we want to help visualise regenerative scenarios that are at the same time hopeful and attractive to people. We want to put the spotlight on the alternatives rather than in the causes. We want to showcase scenarios beyond capitalism and capitalist values, where old paradigms have been resignified and act now as catalyst for change.
We represent a wide range of cityscapes, natural environments and architectures, getting rid of the worn-out westernised image of the future. By creating more inclusive imageries, we can only hope we will make more people feel these futures as a real possibility, conveying the message to a wider audience.
At Sharp & Sour, the future of food is our top priority, and knowing that the inhabitants of big cities will only grow in the short term, while the amount of food produced globally will decline, we needed to act on this matter. Urban farms and gardens do exist, but they’re not enough. Gas stations provide a great infrastructure to generate urban gardens, with both sunny and shady areas, covered and dark rooms for mushrooms as well as spaces for fruit trees or containers to generate compost.
In the paradigm of capitalist cities, leisure time always implies consumption: wether it’s a coffee shop, a shopping mall or a cinema. Here we want to give the space to the neighbours, not in the shape of a park or a kids playground, but in an infrastructure that provides adult people with a place to enjoy the city without spending money. A free, open space to meet, talk, trade our old stuff, pick a book from a collective ‘booktruck’ or have a picnic with friends.
Well, they’re workshops and fab labs now, with spaces for arts and crafts, photography studios, 3D printers, labs, rooms where you can get your devices repaired despite programmed obsolescence and much more. For this kind of gas station, we envision places where people can work, develop projects both together and individually, have meetings or simply going to read or study. These spaces could be a symbol of how to -literally- build a future far from capitalist ways of doing.
They’re tiny urban forests that can be grown inside a roundabout, a school playground or in an old gas station. Pocket forests are full of native species growing together in a dense area, which makes them able to store 40 times more carbon dyoxide. They also generate 100 times more biodiversity than traditional forests, including numerous pollinators and amphibians, which, at the same time, attracts more birds, small mammals and other animals. Using gas stations as forests, simply, could help enormously to fight climate crisis and rewilding urban areas.
Of course, they will need to be electric or otherwise, and therefore we wanted to include a space still dedicated to them. But this ‘gas’ station is not just a charging point for your e-scooter, it is also a recycling hub, a waste management facility and a source of natural and renewable energy. In addition, we use the surrounding space to create a station for different kinds of public transportation. What if you could fly from your nearby ‘gas’ station to the one next to your friends house, on the other side of the city in an electric flying taxi?
