Gentler Futures Festival 2024 - Towards Urban Self-Sufficiency

Gentler Futures Festival is the celebration of design as agent of change - design that stimulates a type of transformation that sometimes is cultural, other times social, sometimes economic, and other times environmental. The festival gathers designers, architects, and makers whose work weaves design with radical thinking, advocacy, community empowerment, and a genuine thirst for paradigm shift.

The theme of the first edition, Towards Urban Self-Sufficiency, provides a glimpse into a future where urban communities are locally productive, instead of passive consumers, and self-sufficient, instead of dependent on far‒away centralised systems. This through the presentation of experimental design and architecture projects whose goal is: decentralising the means of production, imagining alternative non‒linear manufacturing systems, and placing the needs of local communities over profit and economic growth.

The program, featuring hands - on workshops, talks, temporary exhibitions, installations and live performances, aimed to pose questions, launch provocations and inspire new mindsets.