The DUST Exhibition: Hopes and Dreams of Communities Facing Sustainability Transitions

In the final months of 2025, DUST took the visual outcomes of its Regional Futures Literacy Labs (RFLLs) to a series of public and exhibition spaces across Europe. The travelling exhibition presented the visualised results of the RFLLs and created moments of encounter between community-generated futures and the broader arenas of sustainability transition policymaking, research, and education.

From RFLL Deliberations to Exhibition Formats

The exhibition builds directly on the RFLLs conducted in Norrbotten (Sweden), Stara Zagora (Bulgaria), Katowice (Poland), and Lusatia (Germany). As readers familiar with DUST know, these regions are undergoing deep structural change as energy-intensive industries such as coal mining are phased out under European and national transition policies. The RFLLs created spaces for citizens—miners and their families, rural communities, young people, and others—to deliberate on what these transitions mean for their places, identities, and futures.

The exhibition shows these deliberations translated into a set of four triptychs, accompanied by citizen position papers. Together, they foreground community knowledge and make visible how anticipated futures align—or clash—with the intended impacts of sustainability transition policies. Rather than presenting “solutions,” the exhibition critically reflects the plurality, tensions, and uncertainties that characterise just transition processes on the ground.

Democratising Transitions Through Visibility

A central concern of DUST is the democratic quality of sustainability transitions, particularly in contexts where trust in institutions is fragile or where communities feel excluded from formal policymaking. The RFLL exhibition addresses this challenge by shifting the outputs of citizen deliberation into public view. In doing so, it positions community perspectives not as anecdotal evidence, but as legitimate contributions to regional and European debates on transition pathways.

Seen collectively, the exhibition materials testify to the capacity of communities to engage with complex futures thinking and to articulate place-based interests at scale—an insight that resonates strongly with DUST’s broader research agenda.

Exhibition Tour and Host Locations

The RFLL exhibition was hosted at a range of venues, each engaging different audiences—from policymakers and practitioners to students and the general public:

• EU Week of Cities and Regions, Brussels13–15 October

• Stara Zagora Regional Library, Bulgaria13 October – 20 November

• The Silesian Forum of the Just Transition,Silesian Museum, Katowice

• KADRA National Council, MysłowiceNovember (TBC)

• TU Delft Aula, Entrance Foyer3–12 December

• Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment,Orange Hall, TU Delft12 December – 16 January

  
  

Across these sites, the exhibition connected local futures with institutional contexts where decisions about sustainability transitions are shaped.