Project description and rationale

The concept of protopia, coined by Kevin Kelly, was introduced as an alternative to utopian and dystopian thinking, framing progress as incremental improvement rather than an idealized end state (Kelly Reference Kelly2016). In The Inevitable, Kelly describes protopia as a condition of continual becoming – futures that are “better today than yesterday” – emerging largely through cumulative technological development.

More recent reinterpretations, including those advanced by Monika Bielskyte and the Protopian Futures collective, have expanded protopia beyond technological emergence toward pluralistic, ethical and culturally grounded imaginaries (Bielskyte Reference Bielskyte2021). This work productively recenters values, inclusion and alternative worldviews, while often operating upstream of technical specification, leaving open questions about how such imaginaries interface with concrete scientific research trajectories, deployment constraints and governance mechanisms.

This conception of protopia diverges from dominant climate fiction, which tends to oscillate between dystopian collapse and pastoral utopias. Protopian narratives instead explore plausible, situated futures in which technologies, often climate technologies, are negotiated, governed and lived with at civic scales.

Together, these framings reveal a gap between technological emergence and cultural aspiration – particularly salient in climate and biotechnology futures, where public agency and governance are central. We introduce Civic Protopia to name this missing layer.

Civic Protopia defines a mode of future-making in which incremental technological progress is deliberately shaped through civic participation, governance and cultural meaning-making. Unlike techno-optimistic protopia, which assumes progress will emerge from acceleration, or culturally expansive protopian frameworks that decenter technical pathways, Civic Protopia insists that “better” must be actively authored through participatory governance, shared narratives and engagement with real scientific trajectories.

Drawing from the lineage of civic media, which treats media as participatory infrastructure for public engagement rather than passive consumption (Zuckerman Reference Zuckerman2014), Civic Protopia positions speculative, data-informed media as a civic interface for collective sensemaking around emerging science and technology. In this framing, speculative media does not merely represent futures; it participates in shaping how scientific research moves toward public understanding, governance and adoption.

Outcomes and future perspectives

We situate this framework through TIDELANDS, a game and immersive film exploring life in coastal communities adapting to long-term sea-level rise in 2100 (Figure 1). Built as a 1:1 recreation of Potter Pond, Rhode Island, using NOAA projections and ArcGIS data in Unreal Engine, the project integrates environmental datasets and climate modeling to create a civic-scale future environment where players encounter questions of adaptation, stewardship and community technology as part of everyday life.

Figure 1.

The floating home of the character is known as the “Hacker.” The structure demonstrates architectural adaptation to life on water, integrating pragmatic technologies without embracing either a high-tech or anti-technology ethos.

Developed with the University of Rhode Island’s DWELL Lab (led by Madison Jones) and fisherman and food sovereignty activist Jason Jarvis, Tidelands constructs a sandbox world that extends present-day experiments – aquaculture farming, cooperative fisheries, renewable energy systems and new forms of environmental sensing – into a tangible future landscape (Figure 2). Rather than presenting a singular solution or idealized outcome, the project foregrounds incremental, contested futures shaped through collective choice and negotiation.

Figure 2.

A cable car transportation system connects the mainland to the Tidelands. During this journey, players observe community-built infrastructure, including oyster farms that extend along the coastline.