James: OK, just to make sure we are on the same page here: when we speculate about what tomorrow might bring, we pour all of our creative energy into this … thing, this artefact, which is evocative of that future world, with all its challenges and opportunities. Then when we put this storytelling artefact in front of people or place them inside it, it becomes a vehicle.

Amalia: I do not think we are creating a thing. It is not about that. I think we are setting the stage, not by creating an aesthetic backdrop but an agonistic context (Mouffe, 2013) which enables all involved to confront views, to engage in collaborative world building. And it is not just about them and that instantiated future. It is about them and everybody and everything else that makes that future or will be affected by it, every relationship that reshapes and will be reshaped.

James: So?

Amalia: My point is – dear James – that that context is inherently political. While you and I are helping to redesign this neighbourhood, we should create the conditions for the widest range of voices to be enabled to speak, to question things and influence plans, to co- imagine and - imagineer possibilities with us. After all, it is their joint future we are aiming for, their world and relationships we are shaping.

James: Which is why we are involving inhabitants, businessmen, planners, policy makers … We give room to their views. We push and pull at their imagination, their views and perspectives, when we immerse them in our speculative futures, don't we?

Amalia: Of course, which is why they hire us: to think the unthinkable, to raise questions they never asked themselves before, to build a discourse, to make them talk to and empathise with actors they never encountered before, whose very existence they did not even take into account perhaps.

But, what I am trying to say is: all those people, it is simply not enough! We do not nearly speculate hard enough about future men and women – six, seven generations down the line – ‘after’ our speculative culmination point.