In 2020, Demos Helsinki joined forces with an unlikely group of member organizations, activists, and professionals who are capable of initiating a Transformation. We called it UNTITLED. UNTITLED has grown into a global Alliance that aims to reimagine the central institutions of our society and to experiment on how to build them better. Each year, members of UNTITLED come together at a Festival to deliberate, exchange ideas, and grow together. At this year’s Festival, held on 23-24th of September, we are building an Agenda for Social Transformation .
Why build an agenda now?
Now people understand there is a profound need for change. Now agree that the current decade is critical. But we are still not aligned on what kind of world we want to live in, and this is why we constantly revert back to our previous ways of thinking.
We should start envisioning an agenda for Transformation. This agenda should not be just for sustaining, protecting, and mitigating risk to current institutions built for an era of Pursuing individual success at any cost. It should be one that honors the fundamental truth of interdependence of all things living and material.
The Festival will bring together activists, theoreticians, and practitioners of social change from the Untitled Alliance and beyond.
The components of the agenda
But, what do we really mean by this agenda for Transformation? Members of the UNTITLED Alliance have sensed a demand for a Deeper understanding of at least three components of current social agendas: narratives of change, models for organizing life, and novel perspectives on our world. To help us improve on these components, there are three kinds of tracks at the festival:
1. New Narratives
An agenda for Transformation needs to improve upon the currently dominant narratives on change in society. That is why the Festival’s participants are hosting a number of sessions dedicated to jointly developing new narratives of Transformation. Some of these include:
- Politics of Being
- New Geography of Living
- Anti-Rival economies
- Heat Resilient Cities
We further invite proposals for other novel narratives of social change.
2. New Experimental Models
An agenda for Transformation needs Radical ideas on how to reorganize life on our planet. That is why there are a number of sessions where new experimental models are developed by their initiators and co-Creators:
- Free Houses
- Trees as Infrastructure
- Long Term Care Centers
- Biodiversity Buildings
- Civic Spaces
We encourage you to propose new experimental models to be included in the agenda.
3. New Perspectives
An agenda for Transformation must not only offer narratives and institutions, but it should also offer entirely new ways of seeing the world, and use these perspectives as a basis for our future thinking. That is why there are a number of New Perspectives sessions for artistic, novel, and weird ways of working with the world:
- Grief as an Overlooked Force of Change
- Freedom is Relational
- Breaking through the Sugar Glass
- From S-curve to X-curve Transitions
- Everything is a Citizen
- Expanding the Rave
A journey into the unimagined
The Festival is the first step of this process. It will initiate the deliberation. The first version of an agenda will be contradictory, yet openness and inclusivity will be at its core. It will be a work in progress, a living document. The agenda will evolve until it becomes a description of our shared reality.
To reach the goal, we need to find names for what is yet Untitled.
Demos Helsinki sessions
- Anti-Rival Economic Thinking , through ATARCA
The world economy is increasingly based on data that increases in value when shared and combined with other data. However, our centuries-old economic models and structures fail to recognize this value-creation process, causing markets for anti-Rival digital goods to wither.
In recent years, living costs have skyrocketed, while some neighborhoods, areas, and even cities are becoming desolate. Cities are increasingly being built for capital, but how we are supposed to inhabit them is unclear. In this session, we hope to reconceptualize what living in cities-villages-countryside could look like in the 21st century.
Many of our governmental processes work against Solving long-term solutions to the global and complex challenges we face. They are Remnants of a bygone era of linear predictability. Humble Governance is a new stance adapted to the 21st century which could fully unleash the still hindered energy of governments, politicians, and civil servants to actively solve these issues.
Sessions open to all
A different version of this article was first published on the UNTITLED website . You can learn more about UNTITLED by following the Alliance on Twitter , Instagram , or signing up to the newsletter .