Climate change increasingly arrives as a water crisis: through floods, droughts, and rising seas. The tools we use to plan for it are built to predict and optimise. But prediction alone is never neutral, and it has limits: it tends to narrow the field of what feels possible, making technocratic, linear paths appear inevitable, while leaving out the lived, local, and emotional realities of the people who will inhabit them.

The question is who we imagine these futures with!

AI, for us, is never a neutral tool. It is a system, shaped by data, infrastructures, and politics that acts on the world whether or not we intend it to. Rather than treat it as a predictive engine, we work with it critically and deliberately, as a speculative partner for widening the range of urban water futures we can imagine, rather than closing it down. Together with a wider network we develop experimental AI models trained not only on hydrological data, but on narrative, affective, and embodied knowledge.

Prof. Dr. Hilke Marit Berger - hilke.berger@uni-hamburg.de

Annika Kühn - annika.kuehn@uni-hamburg.de

Dr. Gaby Langendijk - gaby.langendijk@uni-hamburg.de

Tina Lorenz - tina.lorenz@zkm.de