Urban Fiction Club: Climate Tales
I’m Rémi Buscot — a trained architect, working across design, storytelling and public space to support territories in ecological and social transition. My projects explore how collective practices and narrative strategies can open up space for civic imagination.I design immersive experiences and speculative narratives that help communities navigate complex transformations. I see each project as an opportunity to reshape how we live together and to design on desirable futures in the face of the Anthropocene.
Always interested in innovative architecture practices, I first worked on circular architecture with Superuse Studios (Rotterdam) and then on ecological urban strategies with Atelier d’Architecture Autogérée (Paris). Nowadays, my hybrid approach blends participatory design, design fiction, service design, and immersive storytelling to make systemic challenges tangible and emotionally resonant. I believe in storytelling as a systemic approach to embracing complexity, reclaiming agency over our futures, and sparking local empowerment.
Amongst notable achievements: Climate Tales, an immersive journey created for the city of Lancy’s Climate Action Plan; Cap sur Regnéville, a participatory fiction about rising sea levels; BZH All Inclusive, a speculative design fiction on rural demographic shifts; and several field residencies focusing on ecological transition.
Eager to share and explore with others, I’m the founder of Urban Fiction Club, a platform dedicated to experimenting with climate narratives in public space. I also share my practice as a guest teacher in institutions such as INSA Strasbourg, ENSA Nancy and DSAA Insitu Lab and am a regular jury member of various design masters.
In all my work, I see architecture and design as bridging tools to help us build better futures.
What if we would apply speculative design to our methods of city making? What if possible urban futures would be displayed in the public space as tools for debates and civic empowerment ?
The project Urban Fiction Club started during a research residency on the PAV Urban Project in Geneva. Discussing with the different actors of the project, I was struck by this conclusion: even though they were designing our cities for the next 50 years, most of the practitioners had little to no idea of how our lifestyles would have changed by then.
In a world of constant acceleration and innovation, where the adoption rate of new technology is 10 times faster than 100 years ago, this blindsided seemed from another time.
Today more than ever, we need a better global knowledge of our possible futures and tools to explore those. Designing futures shouldn’t be the sole privilege of tech companies.
Therefore, the Urban Fiction Club aims to explore how speculative design could be implemented by various urban practitioners in both their practice but also in order to create a global culture of futures. This gave birth to the first exhibition: the PAV Fiction Club in 2024, a display of various speculative objets exploring different methods to create awareness of the different scenarios at stake .
After the success of the exhibition, the project took an even bigger turn when the neighboring city of Lancy commissioned a design fiction exhibition for its newly voted climate strategy. For this, I developed « Climate Tales », a set of 8 speculative installations about everyday objects, ranging from the water fountain to a tram stop, and how those would possibly evolve in order to adapt to climate and social changes. The various objects were exhibited all over the cities, during its urbanism Biennale, in an effort to reach out to all of its inhabitants. Various workshops were also held in cooperation with the city of Lancy, with Geneva’s Media Library and with the SICLI pavilion.