Together with İzmir Planlama Ajansı, Play the City has been exploring the challenge of collectively imagining the future of İzmir through the development of the Vizyon 2074 Senaryo Laboratuvarı — a participatory scenario laboratory focused on the next 50 years of the metropolitan region.

The project emerged from a clear ambition by İzmir Planlama Ajansı: to open long-term planning conversations to a much wider public. Rather than presenting a fixed vision document, the agency sought to create an interactive platform where residents could engage with dilemmas around housing, water, agriculture, mobility, ecology, disaster resilience, and social inclusion, while feeding their perspectives back into the evolution of future plans and visions for the city.

At the center of the project is the online platform Vizyon 2074 Senaryo Laboratuvarı, which functions as a form of civic infrastructure. The platform helps planning agencies communicate uncertainty, enables residents to understand long-term urban dilemmas, and allows local knowledge to enter conversations that are otherwise dominated by technical expertise and quantitative models.

The broader Vizyon 2074 framework explores how İzmir could evolve under different social, ecological, technological, and economic conditions. The scenarios address questions such as how the city can adapt to climate change and water scarcity, strengthen food systems and regional agriculture, prepare for earthquakes and disasters, respond to migration dynamics, support equitable housing and mobility, and preserve biodiversity and public space while continuing to grow as a Mediterranean metropolis.

Within the Scenario Laboratory, participants define priorities, explore data visualizations, confront trade-offs, and collaboratively develop future scenarios for İzmir. Beyond the thematic explorations, participants are also invited to reflect on governance questions: who will be responsible for the choices they make, which institutions or communities should take leadership, and how decision-making power should be distributed across public authorities, citizens, private actors, and civil society. In this way, the platform not only explores what kind of future İzmir could have, but also who will shape and govern that future.

AI and large language models are used not as authorities, but as analytical layers that help participants reflect on the possible implications of their choices. This distinction is essential: in the project, AI is positioned as a tool to support collective reflection and stimulate discussion rather than automate decision-making.

The scenarios generated through the platform are explicitly speculative. They are not official planning decisions, but exploratory futures designed to make uncertainty discussable. Climate disruptions, migration, economic shifts, political transformations, and technological change continuously reshape cities in unpredictable ways. The purpose of the platform is therefore not to predict the future accurately, but to strengthen civic capacity to collectively navigate uncertainty and participate in shaping long-term urban futures.