Speculative Cityscapes explores how cities are imagined in speculative fiction – from novels and music to TV series, video games, and pen-and-paper role-playing games. Today, cities are both flashpoints where crises such as climate change, social divisions and infrastructural vulnerabilities converge, and places where new forms of coexistence, belonging and freedom are explored. The workshop presentations examine these tensions in various urban contexts: whether flooded metropolises, surveilled London, multi-species cities of the future, or the creative practice of world-building itself. The workshop participants hereby combine close readings with theoretical and methodologically experimental approaches from urban studies, affect theory, ecocriticism, and media and game studies.
