Art practice as research to imagine an alternative future in a French coastal urban community

Faced with the climate emergency, more and more territories are adopting low-carbon objectives. These objectives require major changes in people's lifestyles and consumption habits. Narratives are a management intervention tool to achieve change. The dominant narrative on climate change is a catastrophic one that often demotivates action. Developing transformative narratives can enable action and exploration of desirable futures. This paper aims at studying the implementation of low-carbon objectives on a coastal territory through narrative and artistic devices. Narratives of change have been written by the urban agglomeration in collaboration with researchers. Then, an intervention-research of an artistic type has been carried out with students. These narratives are analysed in light of a framework proposed by Rindova and Martin: futurescapes, which are plausible and desirable "possible worlds" depicted thanks to imaginative thought (Rindova & Martins, 2022). Beyond behaviour change, the paper focuses on how these methods affect social beliefs and the will to act collectively. It seeks to explore how future-making strategies and arts-based interventions can be used to help increase the collective's capacity for resilience and develop more socially and ecologically sustainable ways of organizing our communities.