Exploring Urban Futures Through the Lens of a Just Transition: Four Scenarios of Social-Ecological Inequalities in Brussels by 2050 | Aurore Fransolet (Just Transitions Chair at ULB – SONYA), Deborah Lambert (postdoctoral researcher at VUB – COSMOPOLIS) & Lucy Perineau (PhD candidate at Université de Poitiers and École Européenne Supérieure de l'Image, Angoulême)
We provide dessert for the break after the seminar. Please register if you want to join and/or enjoy the dessert!
The concept of just transition has gained increasing prominence in policy agendas at all governance levels, evolving from a reactive social project aimed at protecting industrial workers affected by environmental regulations to a broader social-ecological project aimed at addressing social inequalities and ecological degradation in an integrated way. This integrated approach is particularly relevant in urban contexts, where social and ecological issues tend to concentrate and intertwine.
Yet, while much research on just urban transitions has focused on retrospective or evaluative analyses, future-oriented perspectives remain scarce. This presentation addresses this gap by presenting the approach and findings from COGITO, a prospective research project on the just transition in the Brussels-Capital Region.
The project’s original conception of just transition, and its operationalization through a framework of social-ecological inequalities, will first be introduced. The presentation then outlines a participatory prospective methodology combining creative and interactive methods to explore how these inequalities might evolve in Brussels by 2050.
The resulting four exploratory scenarios – Sustainable Growth Hub, Social-Ecological Pact, Bastion of Resilience, and Green Fortress – depict contrasting possible futures under a +3.2°C global warming trajectory. Each scenario reflects a distinct response to the twin crises of social inequality and ecological degradation, respectively aligned with green growth, wellbeing economy, degrowth, and ethno-nationalist protectionism. Across scenarios, social-ecological inequalities evolve in markedly different ways, with some forms decreasing or worsening, and new ones emerging by 2050.
Building on this scenario analysis, the presentation concludes by discussing key issues and strategic avenues for advancing a just transition in the Brussels-Capital Region.
Aurore Fransolet (coordinator of the COGITO project) is a senior researcher in ecological economics, holding the Just Transitions Chair at the Université libre de Bruxelles and a postdoctoral position at Sciences Po Paris, while also teaching at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. She develops a research agenda on the governance of just transitions from a post-growth perspective. Her work examines the institutional transformations and the political dynamics that shape the making of a “social-ecological state” — one capable of addressing intertwined social inequalities and ecological degradation in an integrated manner. Initially focused on the Belgian multi-level governance system, her empirical research is increasingly extending to European comparative analyses. Adopting a trans- and interdisciplinary perspective, she combines qualitative and mixed methods with forward-looking approaches drawn from critical futures studies.
Deborah Lambert is a postdoctoral researcher at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). Her research focuses on the imaginaries at work in urban transitions. Drawing on political ecology and cultural political economy, she examines the connections between practices, policies and imaginaries in order to challenge transition trajectories and stimulate discussions about post-capitalist futures. She holds a PhD in Geography from the VUB. In her PhD thesis, she has developed an original work by combining research on urban transitions and social imaginaries with a utopian perspective. She worked in the NGO sector for seven years on social and environmental justice issues. Among others, she campaigned at the European level for Fern as a Trade and Investment Campaigner and coordinated the European network of NGOs, ECA-Watch.
Lucy Perineau is a cartoonist, illustrator, translator and PhD candidate at Université de Poitiers and Ecole Européenne Supérieure de l'Image, Angoulême, where she is working on a practice-based thesis about drawing the future. She teaches comics practice and research methodology in the MA Bande dessinée et éditions at ESA St Luc-Bruxelles. She coordinates a working group on digital ethics for the European Network of Cultural Centres (ENCC) and is co-author of On Digital Ethics for Cultural Organisations (2023), which aims to support small organisations to reappropriate their relationship to digital technology. She is currently working with Pierre Huyghebaert on Aïe, a bilingual comic zine and reader about living alongside machines, to be published in 2026