Radical Futures
It all begins with a pursuit of mental freedom. The belief that people can live and flourish in countless ways. Far more than we dare to imagine in the routines of everyday life or within the boundaries of conventional conversation.
And yet, we are always tied to the weight of context. Material, social, cultural. These forces constrain, but they also form the foundation upon which futures emerge. I have a deep curiosity toward those heavy, slow-moving structures. Nature, buildings, organisations, behaviour, politics. They are not obstacles, but starting points.
My academic journey reflects this duality. I began with philosophy, drawn to abstract questions: What can we know? How do we create and use concepts? What are the origins of values? At the same time, I was acutely aware of ecological realities. Ecosystems, climate, material flows, energy systems. Eventually, I found myself in a doctoral program in the built environment. From concepts to concrete. From metaphysics to materials. That is also how radical futures evolve.
I thrive in moments where unlikely ingredients combine. Where radical, unruly ideas provoke buzz – or even confusion – in the room. Futures do not need to be strictly plausible, but they must be anchored: Conscious of history, attentive to the present, causally sound. That is what makes them worthy of deeper consideration. Constructing such imaginaries requires systemic understanding, but also curiosity across perspectives, disciplines and interpretations.
And yet, the flow I find in this work is not about intellectual satisfaction alone. I have been fortunate to take part in exercises where radical ideas on the future become something more. Shared, multiplied, applied in new contexts, scaled into programmes, campaigns, products, services, organisations, even movements. Futures that travel. Futures that transform.
What makes a future radical? When it unsettles you, when you’re not sure whether to approve or disapprove, but you keep thinking. When it breaks or reverses historic trends we’ve learned to take for granted. When it demands major changes in institutions and structures. When current sectors blur and merge. When power is redistributed, away from the most privileged, toward the historically marginalised, human and more-than-human alike.
That is when you are dealing with radical futures.
I believe that people can live and flourish in a multitude of ways, in many more ways than we are capable of imagining in the midst of our everyday or within conventional conversation. Yet we are all tied to our material, social and cultural context that constraints and narrows down the spectrum of futures we dare to think.
But all that material, cultural and social is there, as a foundation on which futures grow and emerge. I have great curiosity towards all those heavy and slow moving things too: Nature, buildings, organisations, behaviour and politics.
Perhaps my curriculum/academic journey explains why I like to commute between these two quite distinct worlds: Philosophy and ecological issues and spent quite some time figuring out the functioning of ecosystems, climate, material flows in society and energy systems. I eventually ended studying in and graduating from a doctoral program for built environment. From concepts to concrete. That is also how radical futures evolve. I thrive in situations where I can combine unusual, eclectic ingredients into possible futures. Yet the futures we create have to be materially anchored, conscious of history and what exists now. They don’t need to be strictly speaking plausible but still causally sound and therefore deserving to have a deeper consideration. Constructing radical future imaginaries/ scenarios/visions/images of the future requires a systemic understanding of what is happening now as well as curiosity on various perspectives and interpretations on the past and the present.
Exploring new facets of futures can bring me to a flow, yet it is not an intellectual satisfaction that I am primarily looking for. I’ve been lucky to participate in numerous exercises that develop a radical idea on the future with an intention of varying and applying it in numerous places with various groups of people, letting it to boost, scale and multiply future-making around the same theme. Building programs. Campaigns. Products. Services. Movements. Organisations.
What makes futures radical? If you are not sure whether you approve or disapprove aspects of that future but you still give it a consideration. If it requires breaking or reversing a long-term historic trend that we have learnt to take for granted. If it contains solutions, or combinations of solutions, that require major changes in core institutions and structures of our societies. If it makes current sectors, structures and systems to diffuse, blur and merge into each other. It results in reversing current power structures, giving historically marginalised beings agency and limiting the power of the most privileged ones. Then you are dealing with radical futures.
SISU
Contemporary societies are built on economic growth. Yet in the Global North, this growth is likely to be limited in the future. And so far, decoupling growth from environmental harm has proven anything but easy.
Scenarios on Sustainable Lifestyles 2050
The scenarios we wrote demonstrate that there are different societal models and spatial designs for low-carbon societies. We also introduced the 8000 kg average material footprint as a norm for future lifestyles in low-carbon societies.
Building Demos Helsinki
My greatest achievement – and passion – so far has been the founding and development of the independent think tank Demos Helsinki into a respected, sought-after, and internationally renowned centre of transdisciplinary research, innovation, and policy work that is driven and motivated by ambitions for transformative societal impact.
Transformed Cities
Cities have always been engines of change – driving social progress, spreading knowledge, nurturing new practices. They are places of cultural renewal, and yes, of economic growth too. Their energy comes from the power of accumulation.
But cities are also material legacies. They are vast metabolic systems, built on immense investments of steel, concrete, energy and infrastructure. Their prosperity has been tied to fossil fuels: In the making of their buildings, in the powering of their grids, in the movement of people and goods.
Urbanisation and climate change are, in truth, two sides of the same story. And this story must change. The material basis of cities has to be transformed. Thousands of cities worldwide have already pledged climate neutrality within the coming decades – a sign that this shift is possible.
Planning has always been central to the city. Modern urban planning itself emerged as one of the most important social innovations of industrial society. It helped turn the chaos of the 19th-century city into the urban wellbeing many in the Global North now take for granted.
And yet, cities cannot be transformed by top-down command alone. They are not only built – they are lived. People make cities. Through their spontaneous, everyday actions. Through culture, creativity, and encounter. This is a truth urbanists, artists and storytellers have reminded us of for more than a century.
The future of cities will depend on this. Changing their material foundations cannot succeed without people – without participation, co-creation, and a people-first ethos as the default.
Today, too many cities are dominated by commercial interests: Financialised real estate, endless expansion of shopping spaces, a failure to cultivate commons or peer-to-peer urban production. Too few create the conditions where strangers meet, connect, and turn daily encounters into the lifeblood of urban life.
For cities to truly transform, that balance must shift.
My work on the future of cities brings these threads together – people and material, structures and stories. It is about imagining and re-focusing on the future, as I once wrote in the title of my PhD thesis. It is about new forms of production, new processes of living, and about making changes visible – and making them matter.
Greater Helsinki Vision 2050
City 2.0 – Towards a Social Silicon Valley was our urban manifesto, an entry to the Greater Helsinki Vision 2050 ideas competition. It won second prize.
Megapolis
The world has become urban. For the first time in history, most people now live in towns and cities. The balance tipped only relatively recently, yet its implications are profound: The greatest challenges of our time will be addressed in cities – because that is where people are, and where new solutions emerge.
Smart Retro
Smart Retro took place during the peak of the smart city boom, in 2014–2015. At that time, most smart city projects were focused on building entirely new districts equipped with cutting-edge digital infrastructure, usually in partnership with large technology providers. Our perspective was deliberately different.
Planetary Livings
Great transformations in society, economy, and technology become truly intriguing only when they reach the level of everyday life – when they start shaping lived experience. That is where surprises emerge. Where things get interesting.
The past 250 years of human history are extraordinary; the last 75, exceptional and dramatic. From a planetary perspective, the figures are staggering: since the industrial revolution, humanity’s intake of natural resources has multiplied 15-20 times. During the Great Acceleration since 1950, it has multiplied 4-5 times again. Greenhouse gas emissions have risen even faster.
Now, for the first time in history, this trajectory must be reversed. And quickly. Simply adapting to climate change and resource depletion would not only be devastating for future generations – it would also be morally wrong. Business-as-usual will deliver precisely those bleak futures. We need instead to assume that profound positive change is possible, despite the weight of history.
Planetary living means taking planetary boundaries seriously. It means adjusting not only lifestyles but also infrastructures, technologies, cities, societies, laws, taxes, and business models. Even values and standards of the good life. And it means doing so within the next decade or two. This is not merely about consumer choices or sustainable consumption. It is political. It is technical. It is structural. And it requires imagination for new ways of living and doing business.
A purely technocratic transformation will not be enough. Technology is essential, yes. So are incentives, regulation, and policy. But without new promises – of excitement, convenience, joy, and reward – such measures will be resisted or forgotten, as we have seen with many waves of clean tech, green growth, and just transition. Efficiency can take us only halfway. Sufficiency must take us further. We must change how we live, move, eat, consume – how we define prosperity, and how we find meaning in ordinary life.
Much of my life has been devoted to making this argument compelling – and, even more, to putting it into practice. Through NGO activism. Academic papers. Books. Consulting. Start-ups. Advising cities and governments. Organising seminars, lectures, and workshops.
The lesson remains: People matter. Business matters. Technology matters. Politics matters. But none of it will be enough unless we embrace planetary living. A way of life that keeps us within planetary boundaries, and in doing so, makes life worth living.
Gatekeeper model
What if people were systematically adviced and persuaded to select the most climate optimal option when making big, long-term decisions regarding housing, mobility and diet?
Founding NGO Dodo
I spent much of my early adulthood with Dodo, the environmental NGO I co-founded in 1995. From the start, Dodo carved out a unique place in public debate.
Peloton
Peloton was actually the name that we used for our gatekeeper training program, mainly targeted to established companies and public organisations. As a follow-up of this process we decided to run a start-up boot camp for teams with business ideas on products and services that would boost food-housing-mobility related low-carbon lifestyles. We ran a sequence of boot camps, then grew them to be longer pre-incubator programs and in parallel launched Peloton Club, a monthly gathering in the best pizzeria of Helsinki that grew to be extremely popular events.
Cases (all themes)
SISU
Radical Futures
Greater Helsinki Vision 2050
Transformed Cities
Megapolis
Transformed Cities
Gatekeeper model
Planetary Livings
Founding NGO Dodo
Planetary Livings
Scenarios on Sustainable Lifestyles 2050
Radical Futures
Peloton
Planetary Livings
Smart Retro
Transformed Cities
Building Demos Helsinki
Radical Futures
