TRAVEL ITINERARY

Destination 2030

Prepare to step into a world that is familiar and yet also unfamiliar. We are going to visit the near future that is in the middle of an imaginative, hugely ambitious and inspirational response to the climate and ecological crisis. It’s not the finished article but it is firmly on a different course and people can see the world changing around them for the better. Connecting to this future was a deeply emotional and life-affirming experience for us. We hope that, thanks to these recordings, it will be for you too. Here are some of the places we will transport you to in Field Recordings from the Future.

The Solar Restaurant:
We visit the Marseille of 2030, on the south coast of France, a restaurant that has had a huge transformative impact. In 2022 it was just a dream, but here in 2030 it is a fully realised project that is a real catalyst. Le Présage is France’s first 100% solar restaurant (the name means “the omen” as in a good omen of the future in French and is also an anagram of the French word for asparagus), its two mirrored parabolic dishes focusing Marseille’s abundant sunshine into the back of the restaurant’s ovens. It’s also the most ecological restaurant in the country; timber-framed, hemp/lime infill, earth bricks and clay plasters made from the subsoil onsite. It is surrounded by edible gardens, a food forest, ponds, with waste food from the restaurant turned into biogas to fuel the kitchen on rare days when the Marseille sun doesn’t shine, wastewater treated on site and used to irrigate the extensive gardens. https://lepresage.fr/wp/

The Underground Mushroom Farm
Welcome to Brussels: a city where what started with a small social enterprise called Permafungi back in 2014 has, by 2030, come to define the city’s new economy. 20% of the medicines used in the city are derived from medicinal mushrooms and, through the growing of oyster and shiitake mushrooms and many other varieties, much of the city’s plant-based protein is now produced here, alongside a rapid reduction in the amount of meat consumed. Magazine covers we glimpse on the newsstands of 2030 include “Brussels: the explosion of clothing made from mushrooms”, “The Mushroom Revolution: how Permafungi revolutionised a city’s food supply” and “Mushroom production now main source of new jobs in Brussels”. We head deep beneath the streets and into misted rooms full of growing oyster mushrooms, other-worldly life forms that breathe oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide just as we do. https://www.permafungi.be/en/

A Car-Free Neighbourhood
What would it sound like to live in a neighbourhood without the constant background hum of the internal combustion engine? When we visited Vauban in Freiburg, Germany, one of the first car-free neighbourhoods which inspired the revolution we’re seeing today, we expected it would sound like birdsong, passing bicycles and people in conversation in the streets. But the reality was more complex and nuanced than that. With the ever-present rumble of cars no longer present, it also sounded like cutlery on plates as people eat on their balconies, like people having piano lessons in their homes, like distant passing trams, like market traders setting up their stalls, like running water in lively streams dappled by the sun, like happy children chatting to each other in the backs of bicycle trailers. It sounded like people cooking together in the community centre kitchen, like crows and wood pigeons in the trees and tiny sparrows excitedly dashing around, like animated conversations on benches and in distant gardens and like bees. It felt peaceful, human-scale and filled with life.