Urban futures

Abstract

This article offers an analytical reflection on how urban futures have been imagined throughout history and into the present. Considering this question at a global scale, it examines the place of urbanization within the development of the modern/colonial order, accounting for the imagined futures that have supported this world-historical process. Three thematic sections—idealization, capitalization, and securitization—frame the discussion. Capturing desires for societal betterment alongside attempts to extract economic value and imperatives to govern anticipated threats, these heuristics provide insight into forms of urban future-making and future-thinking that continue to reverberate across contemporary projects, debates, and struggles. This lays the groundwork for the critical analysis of urban futures that identifies what is at stake in imagining the future of cities in one way rather than another.