Gentler Futures Festival is back with its second preview session: Designers who grow food.
In this informal evening of ideas, talks and exchanges, we question the relationship between design and local food production. The way we do agriculture on a large scale relies heavily on fossil fuels, chemicals, vast amounts of clean water and global supply chains. Its side effects turned the current food system into one of the major contributors to the environmental emergency. How do we move beyond that? What are the alternatives that allow us to produce and distribute food inside the city without compromising what’s around us—the environment, the non-human species, the wellbeing of the farmers? Which skills are designers and architects able to bring to the table (and to the farm)? And how do we close the gap between production and consumption?

During the evening, we will invite NOOCITY, RAIZ Vertical Farms, HACKO and UPFARMING to share their workat the intersection of design, food and urban farming.
Join us in Lisbon, Portugal on September 22 and keep an eye out for the next editions.

The event is free to attend upon registration.
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Why we need a Gentler Futures Festival

Suppose you search futuristic city on the web. In that case, a very cohesive aesthetic will emerge: tall skyscrapers, flying cars, metal, glass and mainstream sci-fi movie vibes. From the image results, it seems like the future is already written. But who got to decide that? And what if we don’t want it?

In our case, we long for a gentler future—or many. To be gentle means that a relationship is going on: between you and me, between us and other communities, between humans and non-human species, between the man-made world and nature. What would a future based on respectful relationships look like? What would it mean for humankind to become gentler? And how do we design gentler cities, worlds, and futures?

In an attempt to answer these questions and ask some others, we are going to gather designers, artists, architects, students and policymakers in the first edition of Gentler Futures Festival: a collective series of events meant to explore what it means to design for tomorrow, what are the challenges that twenty-first-century designers face and which legacy they hope to leave behind. By delving into all the different facets of the practice—from material design to architecture, from distributed design to biomimicry—we aim to celebrate projects, initiatives and movements that are shaping a type of future we would like to live in planet-centred, local-based, non-linear and post-consumerism.

Gentler Futures Festival is organized by BY THE END OF MAY in collaboration with Distributed Design at IPL – Politécnico de Lisboa, with the support of Mouraria Creative Hub and A Bairros.