🌍 Facing the Future with Science and Imagination

In a world where everything is moving faster and faster — technologically, environmentally, and socially — to the point where even adults feel overwhelmed by the challenges life holds in store, today’s young people are growing up in an era of deep uncertainty. Society, climate, and biodiversity may all undergo radical changes within the span of a single lifetime.

Unlike previous generations, for whom the word change often evoked progress or improved living conditions, today’s youth are already being confronted with the language of collapse. This shift profoundly affects their ability to grow, to take ownership of the world around them, and to imagine the future with confidence. Rising levels of eco-anxiety and depression are increasingly observed among teenagers and young adults. It is estimated that nearly 60% of 16- to 25-year-olds across various regions of the world report experiencing eco-anxiety.

Source: ScienceDirect, 2024

Grounded in the belief that education is a powerful tool to help us better understand the world, find our place within it, and decide how we wish to shape it, the SteamCity project seeks to enrich the range of activities available to secondary school teachers—offering engaging ways to bring today’s major societal challenges into the classroom (with a healthy dose of fun along the way!).

Through N clusters (to be confirmed in the final version of the project), each addressing a key theme related to the city of tomorrow—governance, the role of new technologies and IT, energy, pollution, and biodiversity—this project proposes N different ways to help students grasp the core concepts they need to understand, question, and plan for the future.

Our aim is for this work to serve as a basis for teachers across Europe to initiate meaningful classroom discussions on these topics. More importantly, we hope it becomes a launchpad for developing custom tools and protocols tailored to each school context. Ultimately, we envision students and educators working together to take ownership of the question of tomorrow’s cities—and perhaps even co-creating the solutions to the challenges they will face.