Speculative emotional practices: Exploring children's emotional connections to space and time in urban Indonesia

This reflective piece explores how speculative methods can illuminate children's emotional geographies in rapidly urbanising Southeast Asian cities. Drawing on fieldwork in Kampung Plampitan, Surabaya, Indonesia, we combine the emerging method of futuring(s) whereby we invite children to imagine their neighbourhoods 50 years ahead, with more familiar focus group discussions to examine how young people emotionally inhabit and project urban spaces. We situate speculation not as prediction but as a methodological opening as a way to trace the moods, attachments, and uncertainties that shape children's urban imaginaries. Rather than categorising discrete feelings such as hope, fear, or longing, we foreground emotions as temporal, relational practices that surface obliquely through storytelling, play, and fantasy. This requires interpretation that does not assume that children's stories, drawings, or speculative visions can be straightforwardly decoded by adult researchers. Instead, we argue for methodological approaches that remain attentive to context, power, ambiguity, and the limits of what researchers can know. By thinking with , rather than simply about, children's emotions, we highlight both the possibilities and limits of bringing speculative methods into research on children's emotional geographies. We propose speculation not as equivalent to emotion, but as one methodological means through which emotional relations to urban life may be expressed, explored, and made thinkable in ways that exceed familiar categories. In doing so, we call for research methods that take metaphor, mood, uncertainty, and the untranslatable seriously, while resisting the impulse to turn children's imagined futures into adult agendas, technocratic solutions, or developmentalist narratives.