Futura Time
Machine: Porto
10-11 July 2026
A journey to 2050 Porto, a city not only Blue, but also deeply Green.
Futura Time Machine is a gathering of people who want to take an active part in the future of their city. Over two days, one hundred and fifty people who live, love, work, or study in Porto — or who simply love cities — set out on a journey to the year 2050.
There were scientists, artists, futurists, performers, and citizens. People from different generations and different fields gathered, with one thing in common: a love for Porto and the desire to imagine, together, the Green-Blue city they wanted to inhabit.
Futura Time Machine is not a conference. It is a journey where imagination about the future happens, and where each participant becomes not a spectator, but an author of the city to come.
10 & 11 July 2026 (Friday and Saturday)
Venue: Círculo do Porto
Registration: Free to the public with limited places and a commitment to be present at both afternoons
Language: This event was in Portuguese, with English and Spanish also available.
Together, participants traveled to the future of Porto.
What happened at
Futura Time Machine?
10 & 11 July Mornings · 09h00–13h00
Futura Lab Fellowship
Twelve young women from different fields — research, innovation, culture, and territory — formed the cohort of Futura Fellows. Futura deliberately brings women to the centre of imagination about the future of cities, reflecting its commitment to its mission.
Together with a team of futurists, they investigated and co-created the infrastructures of imagination: what must change, what must be built, what must be transformed so that we arrive at the Green-Blue Porto we want.
The two mornings were a continuum. The work began on Friday and ended on Saturday. The laboratory was closed to the public, but what came out of it fed directly into the afternoons and, at the end, into the Map created for the city.
For twelve Futura Fellows
Futura Lab Fellowship · Take 1
Reserved for the twelve Futura Fellows. The Time Machine was at work in the Laboratory: twelve young women from different fields explored possible urban futures and investigated the paths, conditions and structures that must change so that we arrive at the Porto we want in 2050. The twelve Fellows took part in the Imagination Forum in the afternoon; the work of this laboratory fed the collective vision of the Porto 2050 Map, presented on the second day.
10 & 11 July Afternoons 14h30–19h00
Imagination Forum
Scientists and artists opened the door of the Time Machine. They set the vision, awakened the imagination, and carried the room into the future of the city.
A team trained in turning individual ideas into collective visions, led by Roberto Falanga, turned Porto into a shared canvas. Through creative and participatory methods — collaborative drawing, role-play, and exercises in urban imagination and utopia — everyone who entered the Time Machine was invited to draw the green and blue futures of the city.
On the first day, we imagined desires: each participant embodied a non-human element — a tree, a river, a street, a sparrow — and projected on the map the aspirations of that element for a more sustainable Porto. Could a street turn green? Could a square become more blue?
On the second day, desires became territory: possibilities were sketched, options were debated, futures were mapped. From aspiration to map, and from map to concrete proposals, principles took shape that could give Porto a vision of itself as a city.
In the end, participants created a Map of Porto 2050: a cool city, climate-ready and socially welcoming, imaginative and designed to stand up to the future.
Everyone registered was asked to be present at both afternoons.
Free
Public Event
two-day registration
required
Friday, 10 July
14h30–15h00 Welcome to the Futura Time Machine
15h00–15h45 The Tree of Life — Joana Vasconcelos
15h45–16h30 The Living Ring: A Green-Blue Belt for Porto’s VCI in 2050 – Professor José Miguel Lameiras (FCUP)
16h30–17h00 Coffee break
17h00–18h30 The Porto we want in 2050 — a participatory map drawn with all the travelers
18h30 - 19h00 How far have we traveled today, to where are we going tomorrow
Saturday, 11 July
10h00–12h30 Walk & Talk through Blue and Green Porto – with Professor José Miguel Lameiras (FCUP)
Time and space to walk and talk about projects that are already changing the future of the city — towards a Green-Blue Porto — in the company of those who can see the future happening.
In the spirit of the Time Machine, this visit was itself a small leap in time. It invited us to walk through two connected urban parks—Parque Central da Asprela and Parque da Quinta de Lamas—and to read them not as finished works, but as a full-scale prototype of what Porto’s green-blue structure could be in 2050. Beyond their ecological, aesthetic, social, and functional value, these parks advance a future-facing vision of urban green territories, showing that green infrastructure is not a decorative extra but the city’s foundation: the support system that enables climate resilience, social cohesion, and urban identity in the decades ahead.
Rather than isolated interventions, the parks form a continuous green network that reconnects a fragmented territory—universities, hospitals, transport infrastructure, and housing—stitching together what was once disconnected in ecological, practical, and symbolic terms. Grounded in nature-based solutions and climate adaptation, the project brings together strategies such as restoring waterways, planting for urban cooling, sponge-park design for infiltration and aquifer recharge, and flood-capacity landscapes with wetlands, rain gardens, permeable surfaces, and a retention dam. Walking these parks became an exercise in imagining the city through landscape—and a reminder that parts of the desired future for Porto are already being built, step by step, in water, soil, vegetation, and public space.
14h30–15h00 Previously, on the Futura Time Machine
15h00–15h45 Imagining Green and Blue —João Kopke
15h45–16h30 Lusnaturamismo ecocéntrico y derechos de la Naturaleza — Teresa Vicente, Professor and Activist
16h30–17h00 Coffee break
17h00–18h30 The Porto we want in 2050 — a map drawn with all the travelers
18h30-19h00 Intimate concert — Ana Bacalhau
18h30–19h00 Where we arrived: public handover of the Porto 2050 Map
Time Travelers
Artist
Joana Vasconcelos
Professor at Porto University
José Miguel Lameiras
Surfer, Musician, Storyteller, Ambassador of Curiosity
João Kokpe
Professor and Activist
Teresa Vicente
Time Machine Gallery
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Futura Time Machine is a collective two-day journey, where science, art and imagination meet to answer one question: how do we want Porto to be in 2050?
The point of departure is the city as it is today. The destination is a Green-Blue city: cooler, with more trees, with biodiversity corridors, with water returning to shape everyday life, with streets, squares and streams in conversation with each other. Could a street turn green? Could a square become more blue? These are the questions the Time Machine opens.
The program combines three parts: a laboratory for a cohort of twelve Futura Fellows, an Imagination Forum open to the public, and a closing ceremony when everything is handed back to the city — in the form of a Porto 2050 Map.
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For those who love Porto and want to help draw what it becomes. For all who love cities. For young people and early-career professionals working on local and global challenges. For artists, scientists, technologists, imagination activists. For neighbors, teachers, urban planners, municipal staff, students, researchers. For everyone who understands that the future of the city cannot be delegated — it has to be drawn together.