A territorial optimist’s guide to 2040

July 2026

Europe’s future will not be determined by trends alone. It will emerge from the futures its cities, regions and communities can imagine, connect and deliberately bring about.

Ask what Europe might look like in 2040 and the answers come readily: older, warmer, more digital, perhaps less secure and more fragmented. We have become accomplished at describing the pressures ahead. Ask what kind of Europe we want to live in by 2040, however, and the conversation becomes more hesitant.

This imbalance matters. If the future is discussed mainly as a catalogue of threats, it gradually stops appearing as a field of political choice. It becomes something approaching from outside: to be forecast, managed or endured. What begins as realism quietly becomes resignation.

Resignation rarely announces itself. It arrives with a shrug and the sentence: Well, that is just how things are. It borrows the vocabulary of good sense: pragmatism, experience, realism. Yet beneath this reasonable tone sits a choice to accept the continuation of present trends and to hand responsibility for the future to forces that appear beyond our control.

Europe needs foresight, risk assessments and strategies for demographic change, climate disruption, technological transformation and geopolitical instability. But anticipation is not authorship. If 2040 is to become more than the accumulated result of trends nobody chose, Europe must treat the future as a mandate to shape. The starting point is not a prediction, but a question: what hopeful developments do we want to bring about deliberately?

Optimism, but not that kind

Optimism is cheap currency in policy writing. It can become a reassuring promise that innovation, investment or technology will eventually sort things out. That is not what we mean by territorial optimism.

Territorial optimism is a place-based way of thinking and acting. It begins from the proposition that several futures remain possible, that some are more desirable than others and that choices made today can influence which of them becomes more likely. It combines the imagination of desirable futures with attention to the places in which those futures will actually be made.

This is optimism as a working method, not a mood. It does not overlook conflict, inequalities, ecological limits or institutional weakness. Nor does it promise that every place will prosper in the same way. It asks a more practical and demanding question: how can different places gain the imagination, agency and connections needed to shape futures that they consider worth pursuing?

The future takes place

European futures are often described through continental scenarios, aggregate indicators and common targets. Yet nobody experiences an average European future. The future will be lived in particular cities, rural areas, islands, border regions and places undergoing transitions or demographic change.

These places have different starting conditions. They have different resources, institutions, demographic prospects and capacities to act. They also are home to people with different values, ambitions and ideas about what a desirable future means. One community may prioritise economic renewal and better connections. Another may seek to protect its landscape, strengthen local services or develop a slower and more self sufficient way of living. Even within the same place, visions will differ and may conflict.

Territorial diversity is therefore not merely a difference in the routes taken towards a common destination. The destinations themselves may differ. A desirable future cannot simply be designed at European level and adapted to local circumstances. It must emerge from debates within places about what should change, what should be protected and which compromises people are prepared to accept.

This does not mean that every local ambition is automatically desirable or compatible with wider European objectives. But it does mean that cohesion should not be confused with convergence towards one model of development. A cohesive Europe should enable different places to pursue distinct futures while ensuring that all can participate in shaping the larger future of which they are part.

Where 2040 will actually be made

If hopeful futures are place specific, they cannot simply be issued from the centre and rolled out. Regions, cities, rural communities and cross-border areas need the capacity to imagine and develop their own futures.

This involves more than inviting people to comment on somebody else’s vision or strategy. Citizens, public authorities, businesses and civil society need opportunities to explore possibilities, negotiate disagreements and connect long term aspirations to decisions being taken now.

The role of the European level is not to write these futures on behalf of places. It is to create space for them, support the capacity to develop them and treat them as genuine contributions to Europe’s direction. Bottom-up imagination must meet European purpose.

A shared vision without a single blueprint

If 2040 is imagined differently in every place, what holds these futures together? The answer cannot be a single blueprint. But neither can it be a collection of unrelated local visions.

Places are not only different; they are interdependent. Metropolitan regions depend on surrounding areas for workers, food, water, energy and ecosystem services. Rural and industrial regions depend on cities for markets, specialised services, research and political visibility. Energy choices in one region reshape landscapes and opportunities elsewhere. Decisions about transport, housing or public services often produce consequences across administrative and national borders.

No place can construct its future independently of the futures of others. A desirable future in one territory should not rely on transferring environmental damage, economic risks or social costs to another.

A shared European vision must therefore do more than accommodate diversity. It should reveal these relationships and help places understand how their choices support, constrain or contradict one another. Its purpose is not to make territorial ambitions identical, but to connect them, identify complementarities and provide a framework for negotiating tensions fairly.

This gives cooperation a more precise role. Cooperation is how places manage their interdependencies, pool capacities and create possibilities that none could realise alone. It is also how Europe can ensure that the benefits and burdens of its transitions are not consistently separated between territories.

From hopeful stories to deliberate choices

None of this follows from declaration alone. Territorial optimism requires foresight capacity within regions and communities, not only in reports prepared for national capitals or EU administrations. It requires funding that allows experimentation, institutions that can learn from failure and political actors prepared to make choices under uncertainty.

In various places across Europe, local energy schemes, new mobility arrangements, ecosystem restoration projects and redesigned public services are already being tried. Most of these efforts remain small in scale, uneven in outcome and disconnected from one another. They do not yet add up to a coherent European future. But they show that alternatives to the current trajectory are not merely conceivable, they exist and provide material from which larger possibilities can be imagined.

The shrug remains available. It costs little and asks nothing of anyone. The alternative is more demanding: to treat 2040 as a future that Europe’s places still have to write together, with different ambitions but shared responsibilities.

That is the case for territorial optimism. Not optimism as reassurance, but optimism as the willingness to imagine, connect and take responsibility for what Europe could still become.

by Kai Böhme

(Abre numa nova janela)