Tech under our speculative imaginary works to help people, not subjugate them. Wide consensus that future urban worlds under our vision work symbiotically with tech.

Despite their significant differences (e.g. The Machine Stops, 1919; Fahrenheit 451; Uglies; Matrix; Cloud Atlas; Children of Men, The Handmaid’s Tale; Logan’s Run), many of our texts are united by the sense that no social transformation is possible without: 1) connectedness with others, building more humane, collective relations; 2) connectedness with the self, promoting awareness, freedom and self-determination; and 3) connectedness with nature, recognising the aesthetic and spiritual value of living-systems and recovering a capacity for human embodied experience. These three forms of connectedness often combine in representations of spaces and resilient communities rebelling against the forces of the established social order, held together by motivations, values and aspirations with transformational potential. These three forms of connectedness link to what Scharmer and Kaufer (2013) call the three divides - ecological, social, and spiritual-cultural –, which need to be faced to address the pathologies that characterize our current systems for inner, social and ecological transformation. In this regard, they provide resources for the reconstruction of dominant techno-imaginaries. As such they represent glimpses of hope, counter-discourses that can expand our imagined futures and the terms of our relationship with urban landscapes beyond the constraints (and reductionist traits) of techno-utopian urban imaginaries. As examples they are, of course, far from an exhaustive catalogue of the representations of resistance, political, social, humane (and ecological) alternatives to techno-utopianism that exist in speculative fiction. For present purposes, however, they illustrate the ways in which fiction can frequently reflect prevailing dystopian orientations whilst still holding open and exploring the possibility of alternatives existing in and against hegemonic social relations. In this regard, fictional explorations have a sophisticated capacity to combine critique and construction in ways that critical social science often struggles to realise (e.g. Sayer, 2009; Urry, 2016). As a result, fiction may provide a means not just of reinforcing the warning signals that dominate critical social scientific accounts of the SCI but can also supplement emerging imaginaries of resistance to techno-utopianism, exploring seeds of transformative social change and contributing powerfully to the education of desire for alternative ways of knowing, living and being.