This article reflects on findings about co-creating visions of futures around an asbestos-exposed community in the periphery of Mexico City. It highlights the importance of addressing complex problem approaches from the Transition Design approach in the context of social-ecological systems. We emphasize the need to generate alternative scenarios from the locals that challenge traditional normative urban futures. Our methodological approach was based on interviews and prospective participatory mapping workshops with community inhabitants, who generated visions that reflect their anticipatory assumptions and social dynamics around the problem, allowing them to understand the situation in the present better and to use the future as an asset to promote different levels of interventions considering the spatial dimension. The concept of hope worked as a force reinforced by popular communities’ narratives that impulse action toward imagined desirable visions. Finally, we reflect on the need to incorporate spatio-temporal analysis of desires and hopes with the community’s inhabitants and other actors to generate comprehensive territorial interventions that contemplate urban-environmental regeneration in broader time frames.