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Dispatches from 2060: The Pilots Happened.
It actually happened! Twice this week, a small group of people agreed to step into a flooded Fells Point, become an Oyster or a Harbor or a Grandchild from 2125, and negotiate a land-use treaty for a city that is already, slowly, becoming the sea.
-Tuesday’s session was tense and combative (in a helpful/playful way) — the Historic Preservationist and Pub Owner (roles) refused to sign the Accord until the Harbor Water proposed adding an empathy clause, insisting new development couldn’t happen “at the expense of whatever is there already.”
-Thursday moved with this quiet, surprising grace toward interdependence — the group unanimously reframed the water from threat to, in the Grandchild’s exact words, “a lullaby, really.” Two completely different rooms. Two completely different accords. Both true.
What I didn’t expect was how fast the thinking actually shifted. A community builder cast as the Historic Preservationist stopped mid-negotiation and said aloud: “What we’re preserving isn’t true to what has been preserved for the past 200 years. And now what we’re trying to preserve is something that’s new.”
-An environmental planner who openly dislikes history — cast as the Historian — spontaneously drew a triangle connecting culture, habitat, and safety, and placed plants at the center as the thing that could hold all three together.
-And tucked inside the chat logs was a whole other workshop happening in parallel — the Oyster and the Water forming a secret back-channel alliance, private grief being processed mid-negotiation, the Grandchild lobbing in “I love swimming through castles underwater” and completely unlocking the room.
The thing I keep sitting with: even in a governance structure designed to include everyone, speaking as a non-human “felt like speaking a dying language only few could hear.” That finding is uncomfortable and important and I want to keep pulling on it.
What’s clearly next is more space — more time, more bodies in a room, more materials in people’s hands. The 90-minute virtual format worked, but participants kept leaning in and wanting to go further — deeper into the negotiation, deeper into the roles, deeper into each other.
There’s genuine appetite for a half-day, in-person experience with a proper toolkit — printed role cards, a physical map, something durable enough to travel to other communities sitting at the edge of something they don’t yet have words for.
I’m in the early stages of figuring out how to fund that. If you know of small grants, fellowships, or organizations that support participatory design, speculative civic futures, climate adaptation, or just genuinely weird and earnest experiments in democratic imagination — I would be so grateful to hear about them. What do you know that I don’t?
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How does that feel?
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