Article
Chunta Chiu
Department of Education and Futures Design,Taiwan
Abstract
Climate change, geopolitical instability, war, and the everyday penetration of technology have intensified uncertainty, making futures thinking an increasingly important public capacity for communities to interpret change and develop pathways for action. Yet many futures literacy initiatives still rely on short-term, workshop-based interventions whose effects often remain limited to method training and scenario exercises. This article examines how curatorial mediation can translate local knowledge into public futures reasoning and action pathways that support anticipatory governance for cultural sustainability. Drawing on the Commoning Communities action research project developed with Tamsui and Fengshan Community Universities in Taiwan, the study uses a dual-site design to analyze how co-learning, workshops, exhibition-making, and public forums reconfigured local knowledge into shared languages of negotiation. The findings suggest that curating public futures depends on four connected processes: reframing temporal horizons, reconfiguring local knowledge, translating futures thinking into public interfaces, and sustaining action through institutional follow-up. The article argues that curatorial mediation functions as a key mechanism for linking local knowledge, public engagement, and anticipatory governance beyond temporary workshop outputs.
Keywords
Futures Literacy, Curatorial Mediation, Local Knowledge, Anticipatory Governance, City Museum
1. Introduction
Amid the multiple uncertainties produced by climate change, geopolitical instability, war, and the everyday penetration of technology, futures thinking has become an important public capacity for communities to interpret change and develop pathways for action. Futures literacy shifts attention from predicting the future to “using the future”: by recognizing how people mobilize the future in the present, communities can reorganize their understanding of current conditions, revise their judgments, and expand their choices for action (Miller, 2015; UNESCO, 2023). Recent scholarship further frames futures literacy as a broader human and social capability linked to reflexivity, learning, and the development of anticipatory capacity beyond expert-led foresight (Pouru-Mikkola et al., 2021).
Yet in practice, many futures literacy initiatives still rely on short-term, workshop-based interventions, with outcomes often concentrated in method training and scenario exercises. While workshops remain central to futures practice, their effects are difficult to sustain when they are weakly connected to local knowledge, everyday settings, and public communication. Recent work on design futures and futures education is useful here because it treats reframing, imagination, co-speculation, and futures literacy as designable capacities rather than one-off workshop outputs (Sørensen, 2025; Matos-Castaño et al., 2025). This limitation also matters for anticipatory governance, since governance challenges cannot be addressed by foresight tools alone; they require diverse imaginaries, situated knowledges, and public values to enter processes of deliberation and decision-making (Ramos, 2014; Muiderman et al., 2020; Milojević, 2024).
Within this context, this article argues that the city museum can be rethought not only as a site of memory, but also as a platform for anticipatory governance. Museums increasingly function as spaces where collective futures are imagined, negotiated, and contested (Sakellariou & Papaioannou, 2023). Building on this perspective, the article conceptualizes curatorial mediation as a process that translates knowledge, narratives, and futures methods into public interfaces that are accessible, interactive, and open to feedback (Lind, 2012; Martinon, 2013). Through exhibitions, participatory practices, and narrative design, curatorial mediation allows futures thinking to move beyond internal workshops and enter public reasoning.
The article asks one central research question: how can futures thinking, through curatorial mediation, enter the public sphere and help reconfigure local knowledge into shared languages of negotiation that support anticipatory governance oriented toward cultural sustainability? Rather than treating futures literacy as an abstract or workshop-bound capability, the article examines how futures thinking can be embedded in local knowledge practices, public engagement, and institutional follow-up. Empirically, the article draws on the Commoning Communities project developed with Tamsui and Fengshan Community Universities in Taiwan. The title is retained as the official exhibition name. In this project, “commoning” was translated from the Chinese term “供” (gong), which was curatorialized through the visual and conceptual combination of “人” (person) and “共” (togetherness/commonality). Drawing on Ostrom’s discussion of the commons as shared resources sustained through collective governance (Ostrom, 1990), and Sennett’s sociological account of publicness and public life (Sennett, 1977), the title sought to connect the idea of “供” with collective stewardship, shared public life, and an open space of imagination and interpretation for visitors. Analytically, this article understands Commoning Communities as a form of community-based practice, collective stewardship, and shared civic resource-making. The case is significant because community universities are deeply embedded in local life and generate local knowledge through ongoing civic learning. The article identifies curatorial mediation as a mechanism for situating futures literacy by linking local knowledge, futures practice, public communication, and anticipatory governance.
2. Theory and Research Design
2.1 Situating Futures Literacy: Local Knowledge, Public Capability, and Anticipatory Governance
Futures studies emphasizes systematic inquiry into multiple possibilities and preferable futures, bringing value judgment and public choice into the discussion of change (Bell, 1997). Critical futures scholarship also reminds us that future imaginaries are never neutral. They are shaped by cultural contexts, power relations, and pre-existing assumptions about what is feasible or desirable (Inayatullah, 1998, 2008). Against this backdrop, futures literacy shifts attention from predicting the future to “using the future” as a way to understand the present, question assumptions, and expand options for action (Miller, 2015; UNESCO, 2023). Recent discussions on design futures are useful here because they treat reframing, imagination, and co-speculation as capacities that can be intentionally designed and socially supported (Sørensen, 2025; Matos-Castaño et al., 2025).
In practice, however, this democratizing orientation has often been operationalized through participatory workshops. Participatory workshops have long been central to this democratizing impulse, from future workshops to Dator’s participatory futures practices and Miller’s Futures Literacy Labs (Jungk & Müllert, 1987; Dator, 2009; Miller, 2018). Yet workshop-based approaches can become limited when they remain short-term exercises focused on producing scenarios, visions, or method-based outputs. The issue is therefore not the workshop format itself, but how temporary futures learning can be translated into wider processes of social learning, public engagement, and institutional capacity building (Gáspár, 2021; Toivonen et al., 2021; Neuhoff et al., 2023). This is especially important for anticipatory governance. Ramos (2014) frames anticipatory governance as a strategic design challenge that connects foresight with public decision-making, while Milojević (2024) reminds us that anticipatory governance must attend to blind spots, assumptions, and the quality of public decision-making. Situating futures literacy therefore means cultivating a sustained public capability through which futures reasoning can circulate, be revised, and inform collective action over time.
To understand how such a public capability can be grounded, this article turns to local knowledge. Local knowledge is central to this process. In Geertz’s (1983) formulation, local knowledge refers to culturally embedded ways of classification, practice, and meaning grounded in specific histories, social relations, and practical traditions. However, local knowledge should not be treated as a stable repository of heritage or as material to be extracted for policy and research. It is often entangled with narrative authority, external naming, and unequal power relations, while differences of gender, age, ethnicity, class, and generation shape whose knowledge becomes visible and whose experience remains absent (Agrawal, 1995; Haraway, 1988; Smith, 1999). From the perspective of futures literacy, this means that local knowledge matters not only because it preserves place-based memory, but because it can help communities interpret change, challenge dominant assumptions, and articulate alternative futures.
This concern with visibility, absence, and power also explains why feminist futures scholarship is relevant to the argument. Feminist futures scholarship sharpens this argument by asking whose futures are being imagined and which forms of experience remain excluded. Al-Noaimi (2025) approaches feminist futures as a way to challenge dominant, patriarchal, neoliberal, and extractive images of development. Baker (2025) cautions that design futures may reproduce binary systems such as self/other, modern/traditional, and technical/organic unless they attend to intersectionality and embodied everyday life. Abdullah (2025) further frames feminizing futures as a practice of holistic and systemic change that recognizes cultural memory, intergenerational wisdom, and the dismantling of oppressive structures. These perspectives help frame the Tamsui case, in which women’s cultural landmarks were used not merely as an inclusion strategy, but as a way to bring safety, mobility, care, environmental risk, and neglected everyday experiences into public futures reasoning.
In Taiwan, local knowledge can also be situated within the trajectories of community-building and community-university practice. Yang (2011) argues that localness is embedded in everyday boundaries, and that community actors engage in a dual movement between “boundary maintenance” and “social reform,” translating and reassembling local knowledge in relation to external expert knowledge and public spheres. For local knowledge to support situated futures literacy, it must therefore be continually updated through cooperation, negotiation, and processes that enable communities not merely to retain knowledge, but to create new knowledge in response to emerging conditions and possible futures (Sillitoe, 1998; Inayatullah, 2015; Pouru-Mikkola et al., 2021). Seen in this light, local knowledge becomes an epistemic base for public futures reasoning. Through curatorial mediation, it can be translated into shared narratives, visible interfaces, and negotiable public platforms through which communities participate in anticipatory reasoning and cultivate governance capacity over time (Ramos, 2014; Rosa et al., 2021; Akavarapu, 2025).
2.2 City Museum Turn and Curatorial Mediation: Turning Futures Practice into Public Reasoning
As urban governance and cultural economies develop, city museums often oscillate between “public culturalness” and “mass entertainment” (van Aalst & Boogaarts, 2002). Participatory pathways have been proposed as a response: participatory museums invite communities into the production of curating, interpretation, and public programming, thereby enabling polyvocal narratives and conditions for public dialogue (Crooke, 2007; Simon, 2010). Recent museum scholarship further suggests that this participatory turn is not only about audience inclusion, but also about how museums are increasingly shaped by local communities’ claims on representation, legitimacy, and place (Jagodzińska, 2023). In this sense, the city museum can be understood as a cultural infrastructure for anticipatory governance, whose effectiveness depends on whether curatorial mediation can push local knowledge toward negotiable public narratives and actionable assets.
This future-oriented role should not, however, be assumed as stable or self-evident. Sakellariou and Papaioannou (2023), in their study of museums depicted in popular videogames, suggest that future museums are imagined ambivalently: as civic and preservative spaces, but also as damaged, threatening, or unstable environments. Their analysis reminds us that the museum is not only an institution of memory, but also an object of public anticipation, uncertainty, and affect. This insight resonates with recent discussions of the affective turn in museums, which argue that museums increasingly shape public engagement not only through interpretation and information, but also through atmosphere, emotion, and affective curatorship (Varutti, 2023).
Museum studies also view curating as a mechanism of meaning-making: through classification, narration, interpretation, and participation, museums organize public understanding and public positioning, functioning as cultural mediators and organizers of public knowledge (Hooper-Greenhill, 2000). In this article’s argument, curatorial mediation further offers an operational possibility: when local knowledge is translated into public interfaces that are visible and discussable, futures practice can be externalized into a collectively operable reasoning procedure—identifying drivers, comparing scenarios, negotiating values, and forming pathways. Recent design and museum research strengthens this argument by showing that museums can also serve as sites of participatory futures practice, where citizens engage not merely as visitors but as contributors to institutional transition and sustainability-oriented change (Lee et al., 2024). Rather than replacing workshop-based practice, curatorial mediation extends it into a public setting where futures reasoning can circulate, be revised, and become more socially negotiable. From this perspective, the city museum matters not only because it represents urban memory, but because it provides a mediating public interface through which local knowledge, civic affect, and future-oriented reasoning can be assembled into shared processes of negotiation. In short, curatorial mediation enables futures thinking to move beyond the closed space of workshops and enter public negotiation, civic learning, and anticipatory governance.
3. Research Design and Methods
3.1 Research Process and Dual-site Design
The “Futures Studies and Public Life Design” project was launched in 2023 and co-developed by the researcher, the National Association for the Promotion of Community Universities (NAPCU), Tamsui Community University, and Fengshan Community University. Through this collaboration, the project gradually developed into a curatorial experiment under the theme of the “Futures City Museum,” culminating in the exhibition Commoning Communities: A Thinking-Acting Experiment of the Futures City Museum（供聚落：一個未來城市博物館的思行行動）.
A dual-site design was adopted because the cultivation of public futures reasoning is highly context-dependent. Cross-site comparison and co-learning helped reduce the contingency of a single local case, while mutual observation and discussion enabled iterative refinement and the development of a shared reasoning language across contexts.
3.2 Action Design and Intervention Logic
The project followed a three-stage pathway for translating futures thinking into public reasoning: co-learning, workshops, and curatorial mediation. First, the co-learning phase established a shared language around futures studies, city museums, and design transformation. Second, the Futures City Museum workshops introduced futures thinking tools to help participants reframe local issues as plural and comparable futures. Third, the exhibition Commoning Communities translated the resulting materials into a public interface through which futures reasoning could be made visible, discussable, and open to feedback.
The purpose of this design was not to replace workshop-based futures practice, but to connect it to public interfaces, field-based encounters, and longer-term collaborative processes. In this way, curating functioned as a mediating mechanism that extended futures thinking beyond temporary workshop outputs and linked it to local negotiation, institutional routines, and governance practice.
More specifically, the co-learning phase consisted of eleven sessions (33 hours) organized around key themes in futures studies, city museums, and design transformation. This was followed by three foundational workshops at each site (9 hours total per site), using tools such as the Futures Triangle, shared history mapping, scenario analysis, and backcasting. These workshops were later extended through approximately 40 hours of co-production meetings to refine narrative structure, develop action ideas, and consolidate the curatorial framework. The final exhibition presented the staged outcomes of a “2050 Futures City Museum” thought experiment, translating workshop and co-learning materials into accessible public narratives through which futures thinking could enter public reasoning.
3.3 Data sources, Analysis and Ethics
This study follows an action research approach, emphasizing long-term collaboration between researcher and participants in defining problems, adjusting interventions, and linking knowledge production with action improvement through iterative cycles (Reason & Bradbury, 2008). Data sources include: (1) participant observation—participation in project meetings, co-learning sessions, workshops, and curatorial production, documented through fieldnotes and research journals; (2) semi-structured in-depth interviews with six key participants (including community university leaders, staff, and a project assistant), focusing on cognitive shifts, collaboration difficulties, and the perceived effects of the exhibition; (3) document and curatorial material analysis, including project texts, meeting records, workshop outputs, curatorial texts, visual materials, and exhibition documentation; and (4) exhibition forum transcripts as materials of public reflection.
4. Case Analysis: From Community-Based Place Research to the “Futures City Museum”
4.1 Project background and structural constraints of community universities
This case can be traced back to the 2022 exhibition Commoning Times: 2022 National Community University Expo（供時代：2022全國社區大學博覽會）, curated with the support of the researcher. Centered on publicness, the expo introduced futures thinking into its curatorial framework for the first time and used “futures life proposals” as a translation interface. This experience led the association to consider futures thinking as a capability framework for community-based place research and public practice. In 2023, it convened Tamsui and Fengshan Community Universities to launch Futures Studies and Public Life Design, using Commoning Communities as a staged public platform.
Community universities are important to this study because they are embedded in everyday life and have accumulated field networks and trust relations. Through courses, walking tours, interviews, and community organizing, they continuously generate local knowledge and cultivate civic capacity. Yet their operations also reveal structural constraints. First, local knowledge often remains at the level of collection and presentation, lacking mechanisms for long-term feedback, co-production, and reuse. Second, under project-based and outcome-driven conditions, vision-building is easily compressed, while futures thinking often stops at slogans or workshop outputs rather than becoming a governance resource. In short, community universities face an enduring tension between everyday proximity and long-term deployment, and this case begins from that tension.
4.2 Two sites, two visions: comparable pathways of localization
Tamsui Community University has long promoted community-based place research and civic learning, cultivating a stable community base (Tamsui Community University, n.d.). Yet governance issues in Tamsui extend beyond heritage preservation. The overlap of tourism and residential flows, combined with development and environmental pressures, requires local knowledge to engage ecological scales as well as gender- and care-related everyday needs. Tamsui therefore used “women’s cultural landmarks” as an entry point, turning absent perspectives into public issues and gradually forming the vision of the “Gaia New World,” organized around ecology and gender consciousness. This vision re-situates safety, mobility, care, and environmental risks within longer temporal horizons and seeks actionable pathways. However, it also faces constraints: event-oriented schedules compress long-term work; institutional and resource barriers hinder accumulation; and without shared language, public communication often remains at the level of representation rather than negotiation.
Fengshan Community University has long promoted fieldwork, neighborhood action, and youth participation, building networks of co-learning and co-making (Fengshan Community University, n.d.). Yet under urban transformation, population mobility, and spatial reconfiguration, local experience often appears fragmented. Questions of naming, renewal, and narrative authority remain unresolved. Fengshan proposed the “City Museum of Co-walking × Co-creating × Co-living,” using co-walking to build relationships, co-creating to develop action proposals, and co-living to enter longer-term negotiations over institutional interaction and resource allocation. Its aim was to turn local narratives into governance assets that could be shared collectively. At the same time, Fengshan faces three bottlenecks: actions are shaped by short-term resources, weak institutional interfaces make collaboration difficult to sustain, and local knowledge struggles to become a public resource that can be referenced across groups.
Together, the two sites point to the core proposition of this study: under multiple uncertainties, how can futures thinking, through curatorial mediation, enter the public sphere and help reconfigure local knowledge into shared languages of negotiation that can support anticipatory governance oriented toward cultural sustainability?
4.3 Action Design: Co-learning, Workshops, Curatorial Mediation
The project followed a three-stage pathway for translating futures thinking into public reasoning. It began with co-learning and model-building to establish a shared language and methodological foundation; it then used the Futures City Museum workshops to transform local issues into comparable plural futures; and it culminated in the exhibition Commoning Communities, which brought futures thinking into the public realm. The rationale was that, when futures thinking remains confined to workshops, it often ends with scenarios or vision statements and is difficult to reconnect to local negotiation, institutional routines, and governance practice. Curating therefore functioned as a mediating mechanism: it made futures reasoning visible and discussable, opened it to feedback, and enabled local knowledge to be reworked through public interaction. Rather than opposing workshops to public practice, this pathway linked them through co-production, exhibition, and public interaction.
Stage 1. Reading series
The intervention began with a reading series organized around five themes, eleven sessions, and 33 total hours. The learning pathway was structured into three blocks: (a) theory and methods, (b) the city museum, and (c) design transformation. Its purpose was to establish a shared interpretive framework and reasoning vocabulary so that the two community universities could develop a shared language for discussing uncertainty and translating local concerns into curatorial form.
- Theory and methods:
This block used Futures Studies: Theory, Methods and Practice as the core text, focusing on selected futures concepts and tools, including Sohail Inayatullah’s Six Pillars, as resources for problem framing, temporal rescaling, and working with uncertainty (Inayatullah, 2008, 2013). Through reading and guided exercises, participants developed a shared mode of reasoning in which local knowledge could enter discussions of comparable futures.
- The city museum:
Using Taipei．City．Museum(Yin, 2023) as a key text, this block clarified that a city museum is not simply a building or exhibition format, but a way of organizing knowledge around civic life, public narratives, and local governance. From this perspective, community universities’ existing local knowledge was reinterpreted as both material and method for public translation.
- Design transformation:
This block used Speculative Design, Local Design, and Gender-and-Design (Dunne & Raby, 2013; Tsai, 2021; Yin, 2015) perspectives to translate issues into actionable curatorial language. Together, these lenses helped align dispersed local knowledge and public issues into directions that could sustain dialogue.
Stage 2. Futures City Museum workshops
Building on the co-learning foundation, each community university conducted three basic workshops (9 total hours) as the main setting for introducing futures thinking into local knowledge. The workshops used the Futures Triangle, Shared History mapping, the trend-impact/uncertainty matrix, scenario analysis, and backcasting to transform local issues into comparable plural futures and develop an initial curatorial concept. The three workshops formed a reasoning chain: shared language and issue framing; shared-history collection and trend assessment; and scenario-building with actionable ideas through backcasting. The team then conducted approximately 40 hours of co-production workshops to refine content, develop action ideas, and consolidate the curatorial structure. In this sense, the workshops were not isolated exercises but one phase within a broader process of situating futures literacy through reading, exhibition-making, and public interaction.
Stage 3. Public exhibition and curatorial mediation
To ensure that futures thinking did not stop at workshop outputs, the project developed Commoning Communities as a public exhibition and mediating platform. The exhibition translated materials produced through co-learning and workshops into public narratives that could be seen, understood, and negotiated. Its central purpose was to provide an accessible, interactive, and feedback-oriented public interface through which futures thinking could extend from an internal group capacity to a revisable public capacity, thereby extending futures reasoning as a shared civic resource.
Commoning Communities used the Futures City Museum as an overarching frame, presenting the staged outcomes of a “2050 Futures City Museum” thought experiment developed through selected tools from the Six Pillars. The curatorial sequence presented the Futures Triangle, Shared History, trend assessment, scenario analysis, and “forging the future,” and used STEEP as a cross-scale analytic language. In response to local contexts, STEEP was adapted into five domains—local memory and change, technological development and infrastructure, industrial change, ecological/environmental change, and policy and public decision-making—and linear timelines were replaced by a constellation format to highlight interdependencies among events and the links between community university development and local transformation.
Within this structure, scenario development and backcasting served different but connected functions as bridges from imagination to action. Scenario construction adopted a 2×2 matrix, using two locally salient uncertainties as axes to generate comparable alternative futures. The two axes for each site were not predetermined by the researcher but identified through shared history mapping, trend analysis, and workshop discussion. Candidate uncertainties were first generated from local issues raised by participants, then compared according to local salience, future uncertainty, and relevance to action. The final axes were selected because they best connected local concerns with possible governance pathways. This methodological choice was informed by Dator’s emphasis on plural and alternative futures rather than a single predictive future (Dator, 2009). Inayatullah’s futures thinking framework, especially the Futures Triangle and backcasting, helped structure the workshops as a process of moving from present assumptions toward preferred futures and possible pathways of change (Inayatullah, 2013). Quist and Vergragt’s discussion of participatory backcasting further supports the decision to translate preferred futures into staged action pathways through stakeholder deliberation (Quist & Vergragt, 2006). In this study, these approaches were not used as separate models to be compared abstractly. Rather, they informed the curatorial design of a public reasoning process: identifying critical local uncertainties, constructing comparable futures, and using backcasting to connect preferred scenarios with action ideas, future enablers, and institutional follow-up.
Figure 1 shows the four scenarios created by the Tamsui team, framed by gender awareness (high/low) and local revitalization capacity (high/low). The preferred future was “Gaia New World,” alongside three alternative scenarios: “Equality but broke,” “Silent city,” and “Blind to her.” Figure 2 presents the four scenarios developed by the Fengshan team, framed by population density (high/low) and local revitalization capacity (high/low). The preferred future was “Co-walking × Co-creating × Co-living City Museum,” alongside “Fragmented identity and shocks,” “An opportunity for the city museum,” and “Drifting and stagnation.” After scenario development, both universities used backcasting to translate these visions into staged outcomes across three time points. Point A referred to the preferred vision, Point C marked an intermediate staging point, and Point D identified an outpost for future action. This process also helped participants identify “future enablers,” understood as the conditions needed to move from desirable futures toward deployable action pathways.
Fig. 1: Four scenarios created by the Tamsui team, framed by gender awareness and local revitalization capacity.
Fig. 2: Four scenarios created by the Fengshan team, framed by population density and local revitalization capacity.
5. Findings
The data include interviews with six participants (J1, S1, A1, N1, C1, L1), forum transcripts (A2, C2, M2, I2), and records and outputs from the 2023–2026 curatorial process. The findings point to three interrelated transformations, from which this study derives a provisional mechanism linking local knowledge reconfiguration, curatorial mediation, and anticipatory governance.
5.1 Reframing the Temporal Horizon: From Present-Bound Concerns to Shared Futures
Interviews and forum discussions suggest that the first challenge was not simply how to imagine the future, but how to loosen the dominance of the present. For many participants, “the future” did not initially appear as something urgent, actionable, or even discussable. Conversations were repeatedly drawn back to immediate pressures of work, survival, and everyday life. In this sense, situating futures literacy began with reframing time itself as a shared public issue. One participant described how the “shared history” exercise changed their sense of time:
When we were sorting through what had happened over the past twenty years, I realized that urban change does not happen because one person wants it to. If we want the next twenty years to look different, we have to work on it now. But when we looked back, it felt as if people had never really thought about what might happen in the future. We just followed along. Time does not wait for anyone—it passes, and it is gone. (J1)
Shared history thus changed participants’ sense of urgency by linking past decisions to future responsibility. A second participant similarly noted that futures discussion revealed how unevenly people related to the future:
The exercise made me realize that everyone’s view of the future was completely different. You could really see that some people had no hope at all. (A1)
The issue, then, was not only imagination but also affect. The sequence of shared history, trend mapping, scenario exploration, and backcasting helped move participants from present-bound reaction toward a more collective mode of anticipation.
5.2 Reconfiguring Local Knowledge: Addressing Absences and Re-Embedding Governance Contexts
The case shows that reconfiguring local knowledge required recalibrating both perspective and context: whose perspectives were included, and through what governance contexts knowledge became meaningful and usable. In Tamsui, the women’s cultural landmarks approach turned gender into a methodological lens for community-based place research, bringing safety, mobility, care, and environmental risk into future-oriented public discussion. In Fengshan, futures work prompted participants to see familiar places not as static background, but as historically layered sites whose meanings could be reopened. One participant explained this shift through a concrete example:
Before, I thought this place was just houses or a market. It was only during the workshop that I realized the market was being rebuilt, that Fengshan had so many temples, and that these places had their own histories and meanings. Futures thinking helped me recognize Fengshan again. (N1)
This remark shows that local knowledge did not expand simply by adding more information. Familiar places were re-seen through a different interpretive frame. Another participant stressed that local knowledge should not remain oriented only toward preservation or retrospective narration:
It should move from the past toward the future. (A2)
These remarks suggest that local knowledge became more useful when it moved beyond representation into issue framing and action choice, thereby strengthening situated futures literacy and public futures reasoning. At the same time, this shift required continued attention to absent perspectives. As one forum speaker noted, many places already have rich local knowledge but still “lack the perspective of women,” which is why gender became a deliberate point of entry in Tamsui. This was framed not only as an issue of inclusion, but also as a way to reopen “the liberation of knowledge” and “the liberation of power.”
5.3 Curatorial Mediation: Translating Futures Thinking into Public Reasoning
In this case, curating provided a public interface through which broader audiences could engage futures thinking. It made futures practice visible, accessible, and open to response. Rather than remaining inside workshops, the reasoning process entered a public setting where it could circulate more widely and invite different forms of participation.
The exhibition was explicitly framed as a way of helping visitors enter future scenarios through stories and public interaction. As the exhibition introduction put it, visitors encountered “guides” who led them into a new story—one that could gather recognition and encourage participation in the future. The curatorial process was also described in three steps: opening up ideas, using tools and methods to organize collective intelligence, and forging the future by turning visions into practicable collective creativity. This language shows that the exhibition was conceived not simply as display, but as a platform for public reasoning. The affective effect of the exhibition also mattered. One participant described it in simple but suggestive terms:
The exhibition enabled visitors to quickly grasp the issues and planted a seed. (L1)
“Planting a seed” suggests that public engagement mattered even without immediate agreement. Another participant emphasized that what came after the exhibition was even harder than the exhibition itself:
The final step was actually the hardest—we still had to “go have coffee with people.” “Having coffee” was our way of saying that we needed to build relationships and find partners. (C2)
This formulation captures the often-invisible governance labor behind public cultural work. The problem was not only how to visualize futures, but how to sustain them through trust-building, partnership formation, and institutional follow-up. The same forum discussion also described community universities as working in a field marked by both cooperation and tension with public institutions, rather than as a neutral space of consensus.
The case shows that public futures reasoning requires public and institutional forms if it is to move toward governance effects.
5.4 A Testable Mechanism Chain: From Public Futures Reasoning to Anticipatory Governance
By synthesizing the interviews, curatorial materials, and forum discussions presented above, this study proposes a provisional mechanism through which curatorial mediation translates local knowledge into public futures reasoning and anticipatory governance capacity.
First, temporal horizons are opened up. Shared history and trend mapping elevate present dilemmas into temporal issues that can be discussed collectively, allowing preferable futures to be articulated and compared.
Second, local knowledge is reconfigured. By addressing absences and reconnecting governance contexts, local knowledge shifts from background material to a negotiable public resource.
Third, futures thinking enters public reasoning through curatorial mediation. When futures practice is translated into participatory and feedback-oriented public interfaces, future narratives become more open to revision and negotiation.
Fourth, governance effects begin to take shape. Through relationship-building and institutional interfaces, public narratives and action assets can continue beyond the exhibition itself and circulate through collaborative networks.
As one participant put it:
Visions are not fantasies; they can be advanced step by step. (C2)
This statement captures the practical logic of the mechanism proposed here. It frames futures work not as abstract speculation, but as an incremental, revisable, and socially negotiated process. It is precisely this stepwise and negotiable character that allows anticipatory governance oriented toward cultural sustainability to take root in local settings.
6. Conclusion
Based on the Commoning Communities action research case, this article argues that curating public futures depends on whether local settings can connect four processes: reframing temporal horizons, reconfiguring local knowledge, translating futures thinking into public reasoning through curatorial mediation, and sustaining these processes through institutional interfaces and collaborative networks. Theoretically, the article identifies curatorial mediation as a key mechanism for linking local knowledge reconfiguration to anticipatory governance. Methodologically, the dual-site action research design makes it possible to compare how this mechanism operates across different local contexts. Practically, the study shows that curating can serve as a form of cultural infrastructure for governance by extending futures practice beyond temporary workshops into public negotiation, collaborative learning, and more sustained civic capacity. At the same time, such capacity does not persist automatically. Without continued partner relations, role division, and institutional follow-up, public outcomes are likely to remain short-lived rather than develop into sustainable governance effects.
This study also has several limitations. The number of sites and participants is limited, and the researcher occupied a dual role as both participant and interpreter. Although triangulation, timeline-based interpretation, and reflexive documentation were used to reduce bias, further research across more sites, institutional settings, and longer time frames is needed. Future studies may compare how different absent perspectives, such as gender, ethnicity, care, and environment, shape the formation of public narratives and action pathways. Further work is also needed on the design of curatorial mediation and institutional interfaces in order to examine more closely how public futures reasoning can move from short-term engagement toward sustainable governance capacity. More broadly, the article suggests that the challenge is not only to teach people how to imagine futures, but to create public conditions in which futures can be discussed, negotiated, and gradually embedded in local governance.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to express sincere gratitude to the National Association for the Promotion of Community Universities for its support, and to Tamsui Community University and Fengshan Community University for their participation in the Futures City Museum Project.
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