Goslar: Visionary Beacon of Ecological Justice and Democratic Innovation.

This project details the urban futures of thousands of cities across the globe as though they've somehow overcome all the grave environmental challenges our age and grown to become "Super Green" / Super-Sustainable. This month, we highlight the future of Goslar, Germany.

By 2099, Goslar, Germany—nestled in the Harz mountains—will have transformed from a quaint medieval town into a visionary beacon of ecological justice and democratic innovation. The cobbled streets once filled with tourist buses will now host only barefoot walkers, pedal-powered beehive-carts, and bio-solar mobility pods. Goslar's historic town center will remain intact but retrofitted with vertical wildflower gardens on shade-facing walls. Once ornamental, the famous timbered houses will host edible pollinator sanctuaries on their facades, humming with life from bees, butterflies, hoverflies, and native beetles.

Goslar, Germany, in the future

Every citizen will take part in annual “Flora Forums” to co-design the seasonal planting patterns for public and private spaces, ensuring both biodiversity and aesthetic joy. This participatory process—digital and in-person—is mandated by law under the new Green Constitution of Goslar.

Technologically, Goslar will become a pioneer of “seciper-green” infrastructure—security-enhancing, citizen-protective, and ecologically regenerative. All data sensors, communications devices, and building materials will be grown or built from local lichen, hempcrete, and mycelium composites, self-healing and adaptive to climate conditions. Buildings will be embedded with decentralized, community-controlled AI systems that optimize temperature, pollinator access, and moisture without relying on extractive energy sources. Surveillance, once the domain of oppressive regimes, will be reimagined as watchful flora: a network of smart trees and flowerbeds that recognize ecological imbalances, alerting citizens to disease outbreaks in pollinators or invasive species—without compromising human privacy. Technology in Goslar will be grassroots, biodegradable, and decolonial.

Politically, Goslar will abolish hierarchical governance in favor of becoming an anti-fascist pedestrian hyper-democracy. Inspired by the failures of liberal complacency and the dangers of centralized authority, all city decisions will be made through randomly selected citizen assemblies, rotating every season, and meeting in open air assemblies built into the mountain slopes (which are themselves covered in pollinator-friendly flowery meadows).

Education will be free, poetic, and ecological. Every child, refugee, and elder will have equal voting rights from age six upwards, and the right to veto fossil nostalgia—any attempt to reintroduce cars, centralized power, or coercive surveillance. Goslar will reject flags, uniforms, and patriarchal language, replacing them with folk songs, rotating symbols, and a common seasonal dialect co-created by its residents and local birds.

Goslar, Germany, in the future

Lastly, Goslar’s radical future will be spiritually grounded. The town will celebrate Pollination Days instead of national holidays, with rituals led by beekeeper-poets, moss priests, and mushroom folklorists. Monasteries will be repurposed as permaculture laboratories, and churches will ring their bells only when a new bee queen is born. Digital currency will be indexed to biodiversity metrics, and each citizen will carry a spore passport—a record of their contributions to pollination and community life. In the ruins of authoritarian history, Goslar will not simply endure—it will bloom defiantly, a living testament to what a small, determined town can become when it gives itself wholly to the pollinators, the people, and the possibility of peace.