The Speed, Scale, and Reality of System Change
Meeting global decarbonization goals requires the redesign of just about everything our modern economy has to offer. This is a daunting challenge—transforming the systems that produce our energy, build our cities, move people and goods, grow our food, manufacture our materials, and finance our economies.
Every year of high emissions further narrows the pathways available to limit warming, and increases the difficulty of the transition.
The central challenge is not whether these systems will change. It is whether we can transform them fast enough, deliberately enough, and equitably enough to avoid locking in decades of additional emissions.
Event Horizon is a series of connected events, experiments, and public prototypes that explore what that transformation could look like in the Duwamish Valley. Each event takes on different objectives: Duwamish history, energy, mobility, industry, the built environment, ecological restoration, circular economies, workforce development, food systems, public space, community resilience, and more.
No single event is the end goal.
Working together, the Duwamish Valley becomes the testing ground, a place where ideas move from imagination to experimentation, demonstration, measurement, iteration, and scale.
The Georgetown Steam Plant Science Fair set the stage. As a community celebration grounded in SHTEAM—Science, History, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math—the Science Fair is an intergenerational platform for curiosity, creativity, learning, and exploration, bringing together people of all ages to imagine and engage with the future of our communities.
From this foundation, Event Horizon expands the invitation—connecting a series of events, experiments, and public prototypes across the Duwamish Valley
REGEN Festival is the Pacific Northwest’s first immersive festival celebrating the built environment, bringing together the architects of the future to explore the metabolism of the city—how energy, materials, water, mobility, buildings, and people flow through our urban systems—and prototype future possibilities today.
The Village / Duwamish Fairgrounds explores the relationship between Indigenous stewardship, land, culture, and ecological restoration.
Reconnect South Park examines how transportation infrastructure could better serve people, freight, industry, and ecological health.
Other projects can take on clean freight, circular manufacturing, renewable energy, green infrastructure, workforce development, food systems, and the future of industry.
Each one is a prototype, and each produces knowledge, relationships, data, and creative possibilities that inform the next.
The aim is not a collection of isolated demonstrations. It is to discover how the pieces fit together as a system.