Beyond Books: How To Fall in Love with the Future with Rob Hopkins

You can now open a time portal wherever and whenever you choose. You can do it anywhere, and with anyone. Bring your 'unshakable certainty and deadpan humour, your sense of theatricality and playfulness, and see what happens. - Rob Hopkins

There are an infinite number of possible futures that lie ahead of us—like threads stretching out into the distance. Rob Hopkins, cofounder of the international Transition Network movement, invites us to travel to future worlds we would actually want to live in.

In 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted every aspect of daily life, Rob Hopkins responded the way a lot of people did: by starting a podcast. But it wasn’t any ordinary podcast. In each episode, Rob and his guests would “time travel” together to the year 2030—walking down imagined future streets, talking with imagined future neighbours, visiting imagined future local businesses. While Rob’s guests came from all walks of life—economists, politicians, bakers, comedians, novelists and more—they all shared a willingness to suspend their worries about the future long enough to mentally inhabit and then describe a world they were thrilled to be a part of.

What Rob discovered during these conversations was no less profound: this simple exercise of visiting a positive future forced him to rethink the work he’d been doing as a climate activist for decades.

In advance of this Beyond Books in conversation with Immy Kaur and Rob Hopkins, we invite you to join us for workshops tt dhroughout the day that help demonstrate how we are already rehearsing the futures we would like to live in.

We start the day with a Place Detectorism walkshop led by CoLab Dudley exploring the neighbourhood with poet Nafeesa Hamid who will be writing a creative response to the walkshop, neighbour Nancy Touré will be revisiting the Front Garden Retrofit Benches programme and Tom Peel of Overhear.

Birmingham based Afroflux will also be hosting session exploring how Afrofuturism can help us radically imaginging futures.

The Beyond Books conversation at 6pm with Immy and Rob will explore how can we fall in love with the future across our neighbourhood. The conversation will include themes such as the radical imagination we need to imagine a better world around us, where can we find inspiration from across our neighbourhoods and beyond and are our roles in imagining these new futures together?

There will also be a light dinner after the event to continue any conversations that arose during the talk.

How to Fall in Love with the Future is the result of radical disruption—and Rob Hopkin's deep dive into the people and movements throughout history who have used visions of the future to inspire positive change on a large and dramatic scale. From the life and writings of musician Sun Ra and the history of Black utopian movements to the latest neuroscience on what goes on in our minds—and hearts—when we “time travel,”

In How to Fall in Love with the Future, Rob brings essential new thinking to anyone overwhelmed with dread and anxiety for the future. He asks us to consider: what would the world look like if we all got to work imagining—and then building—a world we were deeply in love with?

Perhaps by now, like me, you are also starting to imagine a movement that sets out what it's for as much as what it's against. That recognises these times as the beginning of something thrilling rather than as the end of everything. A movement where you can't tell the difference between activists, artists and social entre-preneurs. A movement that turns future dreams and visions into real action in real places in the real world, rooted in the telling of stories about the future that those projects will lead to. - Rob Hopkins

Rob Hopkins puts imagination back at the heart of future-dreaming, offering us an irresistible invitation to dream bigger and then make those dreams a reality.—Kate Raworth, author of Doughnut Economics

ABOUT BEYOND BOOKS

Beyond Books acknowledges and treasures space for reading, lending, purchasing and discussing what books are, have been and could be to us. Bringing forward voices that encourage and cultivate conversations, offering narratives and ideas informed by our identities, lived experiences and dreams.Beyond Books is a platform where books and other means of sharing stories are used to democratise knowledge, imagination, and enjoyment. Beyond Books is a means of enabling agency through literacy.

We envisage Beyond Books will be key to unlock the dream matter in all of us, strengthening our infrastructure to unleash the capacity to engage, learn, grow and delve into many possibilities for ourselves and our places.

#BeyondBooks

ABOUT THE SITE

This event will take place in and around the polytunnel on the Neighbourhood Public Square site.As we prepare to begin the construction of Neighbourhood Public Square together, we are very committed and excited to keep the site as open as possible. In order to make this work, we invite you to adopt new postures together with us and adhere to some important principles for taking care and keeping each other safe on site.— All activity on site is only open to adults and children aged 11+

— Children aged under 16 must be accompanied by an adult

— Closed toed shoes or boots must be worn

— The ground is uneven in places, please navigate carefully and look out for each other

— Please note the site currently has no toilet facilities

— Please do not take any food or uncovered drinks inside the polytunnel

— Please do not go beyond the designated areas, indicated by heras fencing and floor markings

— Please listen and respect any care guidance shared by our team and practitioners on site, for whom your safety if their number one priority