How to talk about the future

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This is my talk from the Speakery Masterclass in January 2025.

Oh, great, another SUV-driving gasoline junkie. That’s right: it’s me, Christian Lindner! No, actually, I’m as green as they come, I live in Prenzlauer Berg and only got my drivers license last year. I’m a big fan of getting cars out of our cities. But I stand by it: the car-free city is a negative future. 

That’s what I learned five years ago. So, quickly, …

Part of this work is to develop desired futures that act as a north star. And five years ago I worked with the government of Karlsruhe to imagine their vision for Karlsruhe in 2030. But imagining a desirable future is hard work and so I offered them some ideas for futures to help them warm up their futuring muscle. 

I showed them this slide: “The Car-free City” and I could feel immediately how the energy was sucked out of the room. Sure, some really loved it. But some were just tired because this had been an ongoing debate in city governments for some years. Others, the car lovers in the room, pushed back with well-known counter arguments: “I live outside the city,” “I have to go quickly from meeting to meeting,” etc. 

The thing is that “The Car-free City” is proposed as a desired future by its proponents like me. We see it as a utopia. And we cannot for the life of us understand why there is so much opposition to it. 

But there in that room in 2020, something clicked for me. Look at that slogan again. “The car-free city.” It reacts to a problem in the present: all those cars producing congestion, pollution, accidents, noise, etc. And it suggests taking away the cars to solve that. That means we have to give something up. 

That’s change and we humans don’t like that. Change means uncertainty. It means risk. It means not knowing what my life might look like in the future without the car. And so we push back and resist. I mean, look at the image I chose for that slide. Sure, there are no cars there. But nobody thinks “I want to live in THAT future!”

But how about this one? Let me paint you a different picture. What if our cities would come alive with the sounds of laughter and conversation? Imagine streets lined with trees where the air is fresh and clean, The gentle splash of fountains mixing with children’s play. Picture yourself sitting at a sidewalk café, the aroma of fresh coffee in the air (I’m a bit of a coffee nerd). Street musicians perform while neighbors gather for an impromptu dance. On weekends, these spaces transform into local markets, outdoor yoga classes, or community festivals. The city becomes your extended living room – a place where you can simply step outside and become part of something vibrant and alive. Can you feel the energy shift as I describe this? All of sudden, the question becomes: “How can we get THERE?”

It is still the same future! But it’s a different way to talk about it. The “car-free city” describes how we move from the present to the future by taking something away.

The reduction of cars becomes one logical consequence instead of the main focus. This is how you change the narrative about the future. Describe the impact first, then the process needed to get there. 

My point is not about the future of cities specifically, but about how the way we frame narratives about the future makes a huge difference to the conversations around them. This is where we so often get it wrong. Politicians, activists, managers – this is why we generate resistance instead of enthusiasm. But if we start imagining the futures we want to live in, what they look and feel like, we can change the story.

This is our challenge: Will we keep pushing people away by focusing on what needs to change? Or will we inspire them by painting pictures of futures so compelling that they will go the extra mile to get there?

Here, at the beginning of 2025 in what is often called a polycrisis or permacrisis, the people around us, our society, our planet – they’re not asking for more analysis of what’s wrong. They’re not asking for detailed paths of change. They’re asking us one simple question:

What will you answer? Let’s get to work …