Bourgogne was the first region to embark on the Transfo adventure in 2011. After participating in a residency on the future of rural train stations, the region decided to pursue work on the subject of rural life. The Transfo was called in to work on the “Villages of the future” project in direct connection with the department of regional development. The Transfo team worked with civil servants on 5 topics (dream villages, retirement villages, culture-oriented villages, connected villages and wet villages); this entailed making site inspections, setting up workshops and engaging in prototyping and script writing. The results were presented and examined over a 3-day period at the Dijon forum held in October 2012.
The portraits of around forty villages were drawn, revealing the diversity of the region and the various challenges to be faced. The workshops produced “postcards from the future” portraying the future as it might be experienced in everyday life. Although the team demonstrated the value of these methods, the idea of setting up an “innovation function” in-house was abandoned. But even though no lab was created, thinking continues on “Villages of the future” via correspondence, underlining the value of the work performed by the team and questioning how it could be used to influence regional development policies.
