Explain about the future

Stories are effective
We easily buy into stories of future versions of our society — like in Avatar, Black Panther, Star Trek, Zootopia and Wall-E — whenever the heroes in those stories behave and express emotions in ways we are familiar with. As long as we recognise the reactions of the characters as emotionally true, we seem to be willing to accept story as true, no matter how strange it seems from the outset.
A city of the future?
Like in that sequence of Zootopia where Judy takes the train to the city where she hopes to make it as a police. We too feel the awe and excitement Judy feels when she’s approaching the city because chances are we’ve felt the same at some point in life when we’ve travelled to a city of our dreams. And that help us accept the premise of a city run by animals and where desert neighbourhoods exist alongside winter ones. (Of course, a catchy theme song help us open up our minds too.)
Everyone trying to tell a story about a future in cities has to remember that we at the same time are telling a story about a fictional city, and borrow a page from fictional storytelling in order to make it believable.
The future can be frightening
Given everything we know about the consequences of climate change by now, and all the facts the scientific community have gathered on how our reliance of cheap fossil fuels have gotten us in this situation, the question neither why we need to change nor how to do it, but why that change isn’t happening faster and on a broader scale?
As sociologist Paul R Lawrence pointed out 50 years ago, in an 1969 article in Harvard Business Review on how to deal with resistance to change, what people resist is usually not technical change but social change — the change in their human relationships that generally accompanies technical change.
The thing is that the necessary technology needed to live in a viable city in a sustainable way is to a great extent already invented and in use! Buses running on hydrogen, electric cars that gets shared as easily as scooters, buildings powered by the sun and the wind, healthy food produced locally, organically and based on plants rather than animals. It already exists. How about shifting to consumption patterns based on the idea that access is better than ownership and where stuff either gets repaired, reused or recycled into new products at the end of its life? We know how to do all that already because it’s already being done that way in many places. The solutions and technology isn’t new, it’s only not as widely used nor as broadly distributed as it should be.
When scientists, researchers and climate activists describe how our everyday life has to change, they often lay out the necessary steps we must take to tackle two of the biggest causes of GHG emissions: burning fossil fuels for energy and heat generation, and meat production and consumption. This usually boils down to them transmitting factually correct advice to on how to stop flying, use cars as little as possible and changing to a plant based diet.
On the receiving end however, the advice sounds a lot like someone is trying to steal my hamburger, take my car and prevent me from going on a holiday. In other words: like someone is imposing limits to my way of life and how I interact with other people.
In his 1969 article Lawrence notes that resistance is usually created because of certain blind spots and attitudes which specialists have as a result of their preoccupation with the technical aspects of new ideas.
According to sociologist Rosabeth Moss Kanter, who have listed various reasons why people resist change, not understanding how new concepts and technology will change the way of life people are familiar can make the suggested changes interfere with autonomy and can make people feel that they’ve are about to lose control over their territory. It’s always easier to say No than to say Yes, because a No is is perceived as a way to keep control. If we don’t understand the future, it’s inevitably going to feel frightening.