Paris 2030 Climate Futures
Freyja van den Boom

“Paris 2030 Climate Futures” is an arts-based, futures-oriented walk-installation designed to provoke transformative action by making speculative climate scenarios tangible. It explores how current AI governance decisions disconnect cities from natural systems through energy-intensive computation and extractive data practices. Participants navigate a flooded, toxic-air 2030 Paris, confronting failures of technological promises: dating within flood-safe zones defined by algorithms, commuting through AI-rationed transport and submerged metros, or questioning how AI decides which artworks at the Louvre deserve protection. Speculative design artefacts and fiction objects immerse participants in embodied future scenarios. The intervention challenges dominant smart-city narratives by exposing how algorithmic optimization can deepen ecological disconnection and social inequity. It asks how collective imagination, rather than expert-driven solutions alone, can address knowledge gaps and open space for alternative urban futures that genuinely reconnect cities with natural cycles, supporting more just, sustainable imaginaries of climate, technology, and power.