Over the next few weeks, we’re doing a series of posts to introduce the team. We’re starting with Galina, who joined CTL recently to assist us with research and operations (though some of you may have already crossed paths with her at Terres du Son last summer).
Galina studied urban planning in Grenoble, a city she credits with giving shape to something she’d already been feeling. She’d always wanted to improve city life. Grenoble gave her the practical tools to actually do it. (Apparently that’s the difference a good master’s programme makes.)
Ask her about cities and she’ll tell you every building is someone’s bet on the future. Every transformation of a space, an expression of someone’s image of what comes next. The overlap with CTL’s work was easy to spot: how do we build a collective future? And sometimes, how do we come together to protect it?
Before joining us, Galina spent years trying to bring city residents into urban planning processes. She kept running into the same wall: people who’d simply stopped showing up. Disillusioned by promises that didn’t land, convinced their input would change nothing. She thinks CTL’s futurization tools could help with exactly that, restoring a real sense of agency to citizens and city professionals who’ve lost faith in the process.
Two moments from Terres du Son stayed with her.
First: a workshop where she realized, with some surprise, that she was more pessimistic about the future than everyone else in the room. (A useful data point about oneself, if slightly uncomfortable.)
Second: watching children visit the Futurinarium with their parents or grandparents. A dial phone that kids had never seen before sparked questions going both directions. Two generations discovering what the older one had once imagined the future would look like, and how it shaped the present the younger one is living in.
What brought her to CTL? A stroke of luck, she says. Finding something at the intersection of research and creativity at exactly the right moment.
We’re glad the timing worked out. Bienvenue, Galina!
