"The future is not out there. It is here and now, and it shapes our present as well as our imagination."
(Miller and Tuomi, 2022)
Migration is one of the fields most intensely shaped by competing visions of the future, yet least often treated as a space for imagining alternatives in a world caught between crisis and transformation. Using future literacy approaches, in the first Future Lab in Berlin in summer 2026, we attempted to question the projections that already govern the debate around migration and mobility, and invite a wider range of voices to redefine what lies ahead.
From Predictions to Alternative Visions of the Future
From pop culture to politics, the concept of ‘the future’ has become contested terrain these days. This is particularly visible in debates about migration and aging societies in countries of the Global North. Dependency ratios for 2040. Care gaps by 2035. Projected arrivals, projected labor shortages, projected pressure on pensions and housing. Such projections draw on data and assumptions to estimate how demographic and economic developments might unfold. But projections do not speak for themselves. They are interpreted, taken up in political debates, and woven into broader narratives about what lies ahead: an aging society struggling to sustain itself, a labor market in need of migrant workers, or a welfare state under pressure. Political parties, ministries and security agencies draw on these projections and narratives to make sense of what is coming and to justify particular preemptive responses.
These narratives matter because they shape how we understand the present, not just how we imagine the future.
A projected shortage of workers can make migration appear primarily as a question of labor supply.
Projected pressure on pensions can frame aging primarily as an economic challenge, pushing questions of care, belonging, and intergenerational relationships into the background.
Such projections and the narratives built around them are important. But when one interpretation becomes dominant, it can make a particular future appear inevitable, leaving little room to consider how things might unfold differently. Projections and narratives are also shaped by the perspectives from which migration and aging are understood, often drawing on the categories receiving countries already use to interpret and govern migration. What gets presented as the future is therefore never only a question of what might happen. It is also a question of how possible futures are interpreted, whose perspectives shape those interpretations, and which alternatives remain difficult to imagine.
This is where futures literacy and collaborative futures work offer a different starting point. Rather than treating the future as something to be predicted, they invite us to examine how we use and imagine it: the assumptions, hopes and fears that shape what seems possible, probable or desirable. Sohail Inayatullah’s concept of ‘used futures’, for example, draws attention to the inherited images of the future that shape decisions in the present, often without being consciously examined.
The point is not to produce a more accurate picture of the future, but to make room for different ways of imagining what might come next, and to ask what those different futures reveal about the present.
But making futures more plural is not only a question of producing more scenarios. It is also a question of who gets to participate in imagining them. As Pupul Bisht, founder of the Decolonizing Futures Initiative, has argued, futures cannot become genuinely plural if their imagining remains concentrated in the hands of a few. Changing the future therefore also means changing the conditions under which it can be imagined (Bisht, 2017).
Widening the circle of ‘future designers’ step by step
For the first Future Lab in Berlin, part of an ongoing international series, we brought together participants to explore possible futures of migration and aging, not to predict what would happen, but to examine the assumptions shaping what we imagine, make space for perspectives that are often overlooked, and explore what alternative futures might look like.
“Until now, I never thought about how I could actually influence what happens tomorrow.”
— Participant, Berlin Future Lab, Day 1
The Berlin lab was built to create different entry points into the future – each step shifting how participants were asked to relate to migration futures. It was designed not as a single workshop, but as a process of progressively widening the circle of people involved in imagining the future.
We began with the perspectives introduced by the project’s research team, and invited participants to challenge and transform them. Then we opened the conversation to a much wider public at Futurium, a museum in Berlin dedicated to exploring topics of the future, where researchers, practitioners, artists and civil society actors were joined by younger and older Berliners. The process was designed to move between different ways of knowing, different entry points to the future. The aim of the lab was not simply to create better scenarios, but to see what changes when imagining itself becomes collaborative. Who sees something that others do not?
Which assumptions become visible only when someone approaches the future from a different position?
And what happens when a future that initially seems plausible to one group feels unfamiliar, undesirable, or even impossible to another?
Confronting participants’ own images of the future
We began with exploring participants' own images of the future, before introducing any of the scenarios. Using an adaptation of the Polak Game, participants positioned themselves along two imaginary lines: Would migration and aging societies in 2050 be better or worse than today, and how much agency did they feel they had to influence that future?
The exercise revealed two different dimensions of how participants related to the future: what they expected, and how much influence they believed they could have over it. Some were hopeful, others worried or skeptical. Some felt they could influence what was coming; others felt that larger political and economic forces were already determining the direction of travel.
These differences were not something to resolve before the ‘real’ work began. They were part of the material we wanted to carry into the day. By making them visible at the outset, participants could also recognize that they were entering the scenarios with different expectations and assumptions.
“Is there even such a thing as a better or worse future? Who decides what's better or worse and for whom?”
— Participant, Berlin Future Lab, Day 1
Stepping inside four different future worlds
Only then did we introduce the four future worlds developed by the research team. The scenarios gave the groups something concrete to work with, but they also introduced another layer of perspective. They were not neutral representations of 2050. They were constructed by researchers, drawing on particular questions and assumptions about migration, technology, aging, inclusion and economic growth.
Rather than asking participants whether these futures were likely, we asked them to step inside them. What would everyday life look like? Who would benefit? Who might lose? What assumptions would have to hold for this world to work? And whose perspective was missing?
This created a productive tension between the future we had brought into the room, and the futures participants began to make of it.
Once participants entered the scenarios, the conversation began to move away from abstract predictions. Instead of asking whether a particular future was likely, they were asked to take its assumptions seriously and explore what it might mean for everyday life.
This changed the scale of the conversation. A future organised around demographic pressure and labor shortages could no longer remain a question of numbers alone. Questions of care, belonging, housing, mobility and relationships entered the picture. In one discussion, a participant asked what would happen to their 82-year-old mother if she fell and broke her hip in the future.
The question of an aging society was no longer about a dependency ratio. It was about who would be there to care, what kind of infrastructure would exist, and what kinds of relationships would hold a society together.
Other scenarios exposed different assumptions. In the future organized around the economic utility of migration, Germany had become increasingly dependent on immigration while migrants were still not necessarily accepted as equal members of society. One participant captured the contradiction in a single line:
“In future, immigrants are highly needed but still not wanted.”
— Participant, Berlin Future Lab, Day 1
In another scenario, technology had become central to organizing work, migration and everyday life. What initially appeared to be a story about automation became a conversation about surveillance and agency. The question shifted from whether technology would change migration to who would have power over the systems through which people became visible, evaluated and governed.
Some scenarios allowed the groups to move beyond the assumptions that dominate today's debate altogether. In the Beyond Growth scenario, an aging society was not primarily understood as a demographic problem to be solved through more labor and economic expansion. The scenario opened up questions about shorter working hours, care, accessibility and intergenerational forms of living. Instead of asking how an aging society could continue to function in the same way, participants could ask what kind of society they would want to sustain.
“At first the scenario felt fixed, but by the end we owned it – our conversation changed what was possible."
— Participant , Berlin Future Lab, Day 1
Where do we stand, and what will hold us together?
But how would these future scenarios hold up under pressure? Each group was then given a shock. The point was to ask what each imagined world depended on, what would break first, and what might prove more resilient than expected. Again, the scale shifted. Discussions that had started with governments, labor markets and demographic systems moved toward neighborhoods, community health centers, families and local networks: the future went local.
This process opened a different conversation about preferable futures. After exploring what might break, participants were asked what futures they would want to see in 25 years, and what it would take to get there.
What needs to be phased out? What needs to be phased in? And what can already be seen emerging today?
The exercise created a space in which participants could disagree about what was worth preserving, what needed to change, and what kinds of futures they would actually want to work toward. It also exposed another tension: imagining a preferable future is not the same as having the agency to create it. The distance between what people could imagine and what they felt able to change became another part of the conversation.
And it exposed another tension: imagining a preferable future is not the same as having the agency to create it. The distance between what people could imagine and what they felt able to change became another part of the conversation.
Whose future is it we are imagining?
If decisions made today will shape the lives of generations to come, who should be in the room when those futures are being discussed? The Future Lab in Berlin made the question of who frames the future concrete. When participants were asked which perspectives were missing from the scenarios, the answers came quickly: children, countries of origin, people outside Europe. One group simply wrote:
“When we discuss future scenarios for migration here in Germany, what perspectives are missing? — Well, actually, the rest of the world!”
— Participants, Berlin Future Lab, Day 2
Another observed that the focus remained largely on the receiving state.
One moment made this particularly visible. A participant challenged an assumption that had quietly shaped the discussion:
“We assume that people actually want to come to Germany. But that is not always the case, nor is it necessarily so.”
— Participant, Berlin Future Lab, Day 2
It took one person approaching the future from a different position to make a shared premise visible. This is what widening the circle can do. It does not simply add another voice to the discussion. Sometimes, it changes the question being asked.
The fact that societies in the Global North are aging introduced another dimension. Across the scenarios, questions of intergenerational fairness kept returning: who is cared for, who is considered a contributor, who becomes less visible when resources are scarce? In one scenario, older people who could not migrate were identified as particularly vulnerable. These questions are difficult to separate from the question of who gets to imagine the future.
The exchange also complicated some of our assumptions about generations. Some older participants approached the future with pessimism, shaped by what they had already witnessed and experienced, while younger participants spoke from the position of those who will have to live with the consequences for much longer, yet with a sense of optimism. What might look like pessimism from one position could be read as realism from another; what looks like optimism from one position could also be a necessity. Putting these perspectives alongside one another raised questions about how lived experience shapes what different generations see as possible – and what they believe can still be changed.
Changing perspectives: From Berlin to Accra
The circle can also be widened geographically. The Berlin Future Lab was shaped by Germany’s position as a receiving country, and many of its questions started there: How can Germany attract migrants? What will make people want to come or stay? People imagining migration from other places and positions were much less visible.
The Future Lab also made us look critically at our own methods. The research team had written the scenarios before participants ever saw them. Participants could challenge and reinterpret them, but the first framing had already shaped the conversation. Making futures more plural therefore takes more than inviting more people into the room. It also means asking how the conversation is structured, and whether there is room for tolerating disagreement, for different ways of relating to time, and for creative ways to illustrate speculation..
The next Future Lab in Accra in autumn 2026 gives us the opportunity to approach these questions from a different position. What changes when migration is imagined from a place where mobility may involve departure, return, circulation and transnational lives, rather than primarily arrival? And how do environmental conditions and responses to climate change affect the way people move (or are forced to move)?
References
Bisht, P. (2017). Decolonizing futures: Exploring storytelling as a tool for inclusion in foresight [Major research project, OCAD University].
Inayatullah, S. (2008). Six pillars: Futures thinking for transforming. Foresight, 10(1), 4–21.
