How do we feel about the future in times of crisis and continuous transitions? What future(s) can we imagine when the world’s order tends to change often and drastically? Following these questions, Shared Walks | Futures focuses on the possibility, desirability, openness and plurality of futures and explores how embodied experience can create a space for collective imagination and reflection on times to come.
Share Walks | Futures walkshop within EWIS 2023: 10. European Workshops in International Studies in Amsterdam, Netherlands, 13 July 2023. Photo: Julia Feine, Amsterdam 2023 © Shared Walks
* Shared Walks was initiated in Vienna in 2018 by Eylem Ertürk and Bernd Rohrauer. Shared Walks | Climate Change was developed in 2021 by Eylem Ertürk in collaboration with Dr Ayşem Mert, Lecturer of Environmental Politics at Stockholm University. As its extension, Shared Walks | Futures was developed in 2023 based on a collaboration of the Shared Walks Initiative with the Environmental Governance Post Coronavirus Crisis (EPOC)* and Living With Wildfire (LiFi)* Projects, funded by the Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development – FORMAS | epoc2025.com | lifiproject.com
Photo: Eylem Ertürk, Amsterdam 2023 © Shared Walks
The emotional and physical stress in a world defined by permanent change and multiple crises can be overwhelming and debilitating. To deal with these feelings, we tend to develop connections, share with others and find calm in dialogue. We are surrounded by reminders of apocalyptic images of the future, yet we see the power and agency in these connections to imagine, narrate and act upon the changes needed for a possible, desirable, open and pluralist future. Walking with others has the potential to open space for reflection and instigate a better understanding of our environment, of others and of ourselves. Shared Walks opens a playful walking space that explores the environment, initiates social interactions in public space and creates possibilities for the appropriation of space and participation. Different walking prompts propose changes in the way we normally walk. Using a card set with different types of walks, participants walk together in pairs, collecting and sharing observations, impressions, thoughts, feelings, memories, stories, associations etc., mapping their surroundings from different perspectives.
Shared Walks | Futures is building up on the previous editions and facilitates a space where the participants can imagine, reflect on, and narrate their anticipation of various dimensions of future societies in dialogue with others. By walking in urban and rural environments, participants trace future imaginaries, engage in their environment and interact with each other. The walks intend to open up space for deliberation and empowerment by unearthing some of the underlying imaginaries and shared fantasies: sketching out ideal images of the future as well as dystopian futures to be avoided. This experimental approach to future-making explores how walking together can create dialogical thinking and initiate the collective agency necessary for world-building through imagination and anticipation.
Photos: Eylem Ertürk, Amsterdam 2023 © Shared Walks
The Walkshop
The Shared Walks | Futures card set includes 25 different types of walks shaped around the themes of the BODY, NATURE, MATERIALS, STRUCTURES and PRACTICES. The walkshop methodology has an easily accessible approach based on the simple act of walking realized in three parts: introduction (pairing of participants and selecting walking prompts from the card set), walking unguided in pairs (experiencing, observing and collecting information on an undetermined route) and installation/reflection (installation of outcomes prepared by the participants and/or reflection in a group on the experience and findings from the walks). The final installation/reflection session following the walks opens up a space for sharing embodied experience as well as artefacts and visual, audio-visual, and textual materials gathered on the route. This experimental methodology weighs in both the embodied experience of the participant as a way of initiating awareness and action; and also explores how these collected materials come together, what they indicate about the spaces the participants have walked in and the changing perceptions of futuremaking.
Walking outcomes of the walkshop in EWIS 2023, Amsterdam, 13 July 2023 © Shared Walks
Eylem Ertürk 