A Sub-Tropical City in the Baltic -- Estonia's Urban Future?
- 4 days ago
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Updated: 3 days ago
This urban studies project employs various techniques to forecast a wide range of potential future urban environments. One technique involves extrapolations from historical trends and another involves analysis of emerging technologies. Another technique used is the Literary Method of Urban Design, which leverages literary works to forecast possible future urban scenarios. This blog post focuses on one future urban setting in Estonia. That is, the city of Tartu.
Cities are not only built from concrete, policy, and infrastructure—they are also shaped by stories. The Literary Method of Urban Design begins from this premise: that works of fiction, myth, and narrative imagination can serve as lenses through which we forecast, reinterpret, and re-envision urban futures. Rather than relying solely on data-driven projections or technical masterplans, this approach treats literature as a kind of speculative archive—one that encodes cultural anxieties, ecological sensitivities, and alternative ways of inhabiting the world.
In practice, the method involves selecting a literary work rooted in, or resonant with, a particular place, and then extrapolating its themes, symbols, and atmospheres into spatial and environmental scenarios. It is not about literal adaptation, but about translation: turning metaphor into landscape, character into ecology, and narrative tension into urban transformation. Through this process, the city becomes a stage where fiction and future co-evolve.
The Literary Method involves the following three main steps:
1. Select a work of literature: Choose a piece of literature that offers insightful themes or narratives about human society, culture, or behavior.
2. Select a city: Choose a city that you wish to design or redesign. This should be an existing city or a 'revamped' and / or 'disrupted' version of a present city.
3. Apply the themes: Use the themes or narratives from the selected work of literature to envision the future of the selected city. This could involve designing infrastructure, public spaces, or even social and political relations that reflect the themes of the literature.
This approach is particularly suited to an era of climate uncertainty and ecological disruption. As conventional models struggle to capture the emotional and cultural dimensions of environmental change, literature offers a richer vocabulary—one that embraces ambiguity, contradiction, and imagination. The Literary Method does not predict the future; it cultivates it, allowing multiple possibilities to take root.
Tartu Reimagined -- The Willow Kingdom
In this case study, the future of Tartu unfolds through the atmospheric and symbolic world of Meelis Friedenthal's novel The Willow King. From this literary seed emerges a city transformed—slowly, unevenly, yet profoundly—by ecological change and quiet resilience.
Within Friedenthal's novel, a single parakeet symbolizes the nexus between life and loss, between the exotic and the parochial, and between hope and despair. Alas, the parakeet is poisoned in the opening chapters of the novel though. The scenario art in the gallery below, however, imagines the parakeet survives the poisoning, before meeting up with other feral parakeets, who then together stake out a home within both urban willow woodlands --- and within an emerging semi-tropical city-wide wilderness.
GALLERY: A series of urban scenes of future Tartu -- inspired by Meelis Friedenthal's novel The Willow King
At the heart of this vision of the future is a kingdom of willows, taking root within the crumbling remains of Tartu’s cathedral. What begins as a fragile enclave gradually thickens into a dense, living architecture: branches weaving through stone, leaves filtering light across abandoned vaults, and wind animating a space once defined by stillness. The cathedral becomes less a ruin than a host—its decay nurturing a new, vegetal sovereignty.
Within this growing 'spirituallly-alligned' woodland, flocks of green parakeets gather. Their presence is at once improbable and inevitable: emissaries of a shifting climate -- carriers of color and sound into an urban landscape once heavy with muted northern European tones.
As temperatures rise and seasons soften, Tartu begins to tilt toward the semi-tropical. Willows proliferate along riverbanks, in courtyards, across derelict lots; their presence knitting together pockets of wet urban wilderness.
The parakeets follow this expansion. They nest in branches that overhang streets, in cavities of aging buildings, in the interstices between human retreat and ecological advance. Their calls echo across the city, a shifting chorus that signals not just survival, but transformation.
Over time, the Willow Kingdom is no longer confined to a single site. It becomes a condition—a diffuse, living network that redefines Tartu as a place where decay and growth are inseparable, where the boundaries between architecture and ecology dissolve, and where a once-lost creature becomes the unlikely emblem of continuity.
Footnote: The scenario artworks developed from this study were exhibited at the University of Tartu Art Museum as part of Tartu’s program as a European Capital of Culture, within the "Transforming Literary Places" exhibition. See the links below for more information.
University of Tartu Instagram: Instagram
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