Deliverable D1.1 – Futures Literacy Laboratories: Cross-cutting insights from workshops in Denmark, Latvia, Poland and Norway presents the main outcomes of Work Package 1 in the TransScale project. The report synthesises insights from four Futures Literacy Laboratories (FLLs) conducted in 2025 across the project’s national contexts, coordinated by the Norwegian partner NIFU.
Building on the theoretical foundations of futures literacy and transformative learning, the deliverable documents how FLLs function as experimental learning spaces in which participants collectively explore, question, and reframe assumptions about the future of sharing, reuse, and circular practices in urban settings. The laboratories brought together diverse stakeholders, including municipal actors, NGOs, practitioners, researchers, and civil society representatives, and followed a shared methodological framework adapted from UNESCO’s Futures Literacy approach.
The report provides detailed accounts of the national laboratories in Denmark, Latvia, Poland, and Norway, alongside a cross-country analysis of three core sessions: hope, realism, and reframing. Through this comparative perspective, D1.1 highlights both common patterns and context-specific differences in how futures of circularity, repair, and reuse are imagined, contested, and negotiated. The analysis reveals strong convergence around aspirations for circular, low-consumption societies, while also exposing structural barriers, governance challenges, and tensions between desirable and expected futures.
Beyond empirical findings, Deliverable D1.1 offers critical methodological reflections on the use of Futures Literacy Laboratories within sustainability transition research. It discusses the strengths and limitations of FLLs as tools for fostering futures literacy, enabling transformative learning, and generating qualitative insights into stakeholder expectations, values, and anticipatory assumptions. As such, the deliverable provides an important conceptual and methodological reference for future TransScale activities and for research on participatory approaches to urban sustainability transitions.