Joost Vandecasteele and Giuseppe Porcaro Imagine a future where the Capital of the European Union moves to Budapest, leaving Brussels with a wasteland of empty offices which will be re-used in a very peculiar way.
Science fiction cityscapes have awed audiences since Metropolis debuted in Germany in 1927.
Steve Graham, a professor of cities and society in the Global Urban Research Unit at Newcastle University has highlighted such reciprocal relationship between science fiction and reality.
Think, for example, that the future Los Angeles of Blade Runner implies the end of nationalism. The flooded New York of Spielberg’s Artificial Intelligence implies climate change and loss. The upper middle class verticality of Spike Jonze’s Her implies the economic and cultural results of widespread automation.
These cities aren’t just predictions, they’re caricatures of our culture that eventually inform real world decision making.
Brussels, to a certain extent, is a microcosm of the European Union. And speculation and fiction about the future of Brussels can tell us a thing or two about the future of Europe.
With Joost Vandecasteele we are going to imagine a future where the Capital of the European Union moves to Budapest, leaving Brussels with a wasteland of empty offices which will be re-used in a very peculiar way.
Joost Vandecasteele is a Belgium writer and author of books like Massa, Jungle and Bella
his debut short story collection was made into a television series called Generation B. He is working currently on a new book, game and film
Giuseppe Porcaro is the author of DISCO SOUR, a novel about Europe and democracy in the age of algorithms, among the winners of the Altiero Spinelli Prize for Outrech of the European Union in 2018. Giuseppe is interested in how the intersection between technology and politics is moving towards uncharted territories in the future. He also focuses on narrative-building and political representations in the European Union. He works as the head of communications for Bruegel.