When we ask young people about the future, we rarely get grand political visions.
Instead, we catch traces of their dreams when we follow them through the festival landscape. Between tents, stages, queues, and spontaneous encounters between strangers. Here, new beginnings become clearly visible: in moments, actions, small shifts. Something new takes shape when everyday life is suspended in the festival city - here, another way of being in the world emerges. Through the body, through action and through community, young people give form to hope for the future - and utopias appear before they have words for them.
The background for our focus on Utopia can be traced back to the first edition of the Roskilde Festival Group’s knowledge festival, GRASP, in 2021. Here, Geoff Mulgan, Professor of Collective Intelligence, Public Policy and Social Innovation at University College London, presented a stark diagnosis:
“Our major institutions are failing us,” he said. “Digital development has eroded our collective imagination.” Mulgan called this an imagination crisis—a collective crisis of imagination.
This means that today we struggle to imagine that the world could be fundamentally different from the one we know. When asked to picture a radically different future, most of us end up thinking only in variations of the familiar. Since the 1970s, utopian narratives in film and literature have become fewer, while dystopias have flourished. Visions of a better world have almost disappeared from our shared mental landscape. But if we cannot imagine another world, how are we to create it? Imagination is like a muscle that withers without use. In our rational, productivity-focused culture, we have systematically trained ourselves away from fantasy and visionary thinking.
However, in his book Another World Is Possible, Mulgan points out that certain places, such as large cultural events and art, can strengthen the imagination because they generate small utopian impulses. Roskilde Festival therefore holds a unique potential to bring the imagination of other possible futures to life.
When we asked our young participants directly what they associated with the word utopia, the concept was for most of them unfamiliar, abstract, and almost inaccessible. But our research also revealed something else:
Concrete actions turned out to be able to open the imagination. And as we followed them through the festival landscape, from the camping areas to the front of the stages, from the toilet queues to spontaneous encounters between strangers, we discovered something fundamental:
Utopias are alive—just not where, or in the form, we expected to find them.
Young people do not show us finished utopias, but their beginnings. They show us how imagery emerge in practice, long before they become articulated ideas. The field of inquiry -young people’s relationship to utopias and their dreams of the future - required an open, experimental, and curious approach. We followed groups of participants throughout their entire festival stay. They responded to daily text messages, took photos with disposable cameras, and marked on city maps where they had experienced something inspiring, surprising, or meaningful. Other young people kept diaries, took part in workshops, and we carried out both qualitative and quantitative studies, as well as anthropologically inspired fieldwork and artistic collaborations. We observed them in queues, in camps, at communal meals, in moments where care, humour, chaos, and hope emerged spontaneously. The method was inspired by anthropology, deep learning, and participatory design. A kind of field research into future hope, where we allowed young people to show us what we could not have anticipated.
We used their words, images, routes through the festival, and sensory experiences as data. At Flokkr (the festival’s assembly house) we sent participants on future-dream journeys in collaboration with the Danish Green Youth Movement (DGUB). And at the Orange Stage, also in collaboration with DGUB, we screened films on the big screens that trained the imagination through questions such as: What future do you see? What future are you seeking? How does the world feel 30 years from now? What do we pass on? An exercise in radical empathy, where we imagined the gaze of future generations looking back at our present.
Words and stories from the dream journeys and from DGUB’s 2023 publication Retfærdig Naturbevarelse were transformed into beautiful future visualisations by the artist duo Baum & Lehy in the work Pantopia, which participants could experience at the festival. In our Flokkr Lab, NGO partners and the artists were brought together to inspire one another. Valuable knowledge and understanding were gathered from the many engaging formats that emerged from this work, where, as part of the festival’s Art & Activism programme, we invited participants to reflection, inspiration, and collective action under the Utopia theme.
We have had an ongoing collaboration with Associate Professor Jonas Lieberkind, who researches young people’s civic engagement and democratic participation. Jonas has contributed by contextualising the collected knowledge within broader research data and by offering perspectives on the trends that have emerged.
It is this methodological diversity - from text messages, diaries, and images to narratives, analyses, and future meditations - that has made it possible to get close to something as intangible as young people’s utopian impulses and dreams of the future. We gained access to something that is rarely captured in conventional studies: what is felt in the body when living temporarily in a festival city, where a different world can be glimpsed at the edges of everyday life.
Our research shows that for the majority of young people today, utopia is not a distant dream or a grand political vision. It is concrete, everyday, embodied, and it unfolds in spaces of community. It emerges in the moment when the neighbouring camp invites you to share food or lukewarm beers. In the conversation about climate justice that continues down in the tent. In the front pocket while waiting in the toilet queue. Among young men knitting with raw wool. In the trust involved in lending things to strangers. In the circular way the festival city is built. In the taste of plant-rich meals made from surplus ingredients.
Over the three years of research, we have observed a clear pattern: young people particularly long for community. At the festival, they find it when the boundary between you and me dissolves. Where you are “in it together” on the camping grounds, and where helpfulness and openness are the norm rather than the exception. This stands in sharp contrast to the individualisation that characterises their everyday lives. “At home, it’s more every person for themselves,” as one participant put it. But within the festival’s special space, other possibilities are released, where community outweighs individuality, where social norms are renegotiated, and where imperfection is not a flaw, but a value.
Utopia in 2025 is not what it was in 1968. It has moved from large-scale societal projects to the near, the personal, even the intimate.
Not because the grand visions are irrelevant, but because the path to change today increasingly seems to begin in the everyday.
Where we initially searched for the Big U in utopia - the visionary ideas of societal transformation - we found the Small U. Not as a diluted version, but as a different form of utopia: a social utopia, carried by concrete actions in the present. Not something one collectively dreams of, but something one does. Art and activism create the big visionary lines - the Big U - through installations, stage programmes, and narratives of climate justice, peace, and diverse communities. At the same time, the Small U emerges in the everyday life of the festival: the bio-glitter on cheeks, the help offered to retrieve a pavilion that blew away, or a kiss shared with a stranger. Both forms of utopia matter—and at the festival, they are closely intertwined. What does this mean in practice?
Our research suggests that if we want to strengthen young people’s engagement and hope for the future, we must not only talk about grand visions. We must create spaces where they can experience and test alternative ways of being in the world. Where they can feel it in their bodies, see it with their own eyes, and sense through community that change is not only imaginable, but already underway.
The festival thus becomes not only a glimpse of how the world could be, but a platform for practising how to create it. A utopian laboratory where participants are not passive recipients of utopian visions; they are active co-creators of utopian practices. They experiment, test, fail and learn. And through this process, small shifts occur that gradually trace the contours of a future that is not only possible, but on its way.
For many young people, these everyday utopian practices can be just as transformative as traditional activism. They demonstrate, in tangible ways, that a different world is not only something one can dream of, but something one can experience. Here. Now.
Utopia is a story about how hope is rediscovered. About how communities are formed. About how small, close-to-home actions carry transformative potential. And about how a festival can be much more than music and celebration—it can be a laboratory for the future. It is also a story about how we can train our collective imagination—and why this is one of the most urgent tasks of our time.
Working with Utopia in a time marked by crisis is not naïve daydreaming. For us—and for many of the artists, NGOs, and activists we collaborate with—it is a form of activism and protest: an insistence that more just futures are possible. As the young activists from the Danish Green Youth Movement write in Just Nature Conservation:
“Even though it may seem overwhelming—yes, almost impossible—to change the future we are facing, we want to show the hope, the dreams, and the possibilities of a caring world where there is room for all living beings. […] Utopia is our act of protest.”
The greatest risk is not that change is impossible, but that we abandon the imagination of it. We must keep hope alive—not through naïve optimism, but through concrete practices that show that a different world is not only imaginable, but already on its way through the thousands of small and large actions we carry out together.
Utopia has always been a space for longing, a place where we can test ideas that have not yet taken root in reality. Today, as described, most young people’s dreams of the future take new forms: they are less loud, more embodied, more rooted in the near and in communities that make sense here and now. These new forms of future hope mirror young people’s longings and can act as catalysts for collective engagement in creating sustainable change.
Kara Djurhuus
Head of Philanthropy & NGO Partnerships
Roskilde Festival Group
This article is an excerpt from Utopia - a new publication from the Roskilde Festival Group that brings together three years of work on young people’s imagination, hope, and capacity to act.
The book explores how utopian impulses emerge in communities, artistic experiments, and everyday practices when young people are given space to dream, create, and act together.
Utopia is aimed at everyone working with young people, culture, democracy, sustainability, and change. And at anyone concerned with how we can strengthen our shared ability to imagine a different future.
If you are curious about how hope can take shape in practice, and how small actions can carry far-reaching perspectives, the book is an invitation to read along, and to take part in the work of keeping the future open.
Utopia can be purchased via the publisher Økotopia.
