Alternative Urban Futures Research Articles

Exploring desired urban futures: the transformative potential of a nature-based approach

Amidst multiple crises and calls for transformative change, the demand to reassess human-nature relationships has increased. Rethinking the future of cities is vital in this process, yet positive urban visions prioritizing nature beyond human-centred perspectives are lacking. To address this gap, we propose a “nature-based desired futures” approach for envisaging and building collective discussion around transformative change. We explore four concepts underpinning (i) why such alternative urban futures are needed (human-nature disconnect and changing urban imaginaries) and (ii) how they might be approached (transformative change and leverage, and the ‘education of desire’). This provides the basis for a participatory approach that adapts the Three Horizon method to explore desired urban futures for nature in 2050. Six workshops involving 111 participants linked to ‘Conexus’, a project on nature-based solutions in European and Latin American cities, explored emerging desired futures, evolving ideas of nature, human-nature relationships, and agency. The approach offers space for reflection creative exploration, and weaving together of new, hopeful, caring, emancipatory stories. Its effectiveness hinges on the mutually reinforcing power of deep leverage, and of structural, systemic, and enabling approaches, to give purpose and direction to the exploration of desired futures.

Citizens envisioning life in 2040: A qualitative corporate foresight study in London

AbstractUrban living is changing. Citizens explore new lifestyles in practice and envision alternative urban futures. Companies, as significant stakeholders in cities, are building urban infrastructure and serving citizens' needs. To succeed in the future, companies must be able to navigate the complexity and diversity of evolving cities. However, former corporate foresight research on cities is sparse. This participatory corporate foresight study examines city life in 2040 by engaging a group of London citizens with a lead user profile. A qualitative multimethod approach, consisting of online diaries, a futures imagining workshop, and in‐depth interviews, explores citizens' images of the future and lifestyle changes. The lifestyle adjustments experienced during the COVID‐19 pandemic period have acted as a catalyst for novel personal and communal futures. The broad range of visions included both continuity and discontinuity, with a moderately optimistic undertone, and featured communal, infrastructural, ecological, and technological aspects of life. These visions emphasized sustainability in multiple areas of life and demonstrated the dynamic relationship of the past, present, and future. The methodological contribution of this paper lies in its multimethod approach, which enabled an agile collection of textual and audio‐visual datasets in both online and face‐to‐face contexts. This agility is particularly relevant in a corporate foresight context, where companies must balance efficiency, depth, and applicability while operating under resource constraints. The article also extends the lead user approach's use from individual products and services to the city environment and urban lifestyle in general.

The politics of deautomation: Being disaffected by platform capitalism

Being affected in on-demand platform urbanism is a primary site of politics, not an aftereffect that happens once capitalism has had its way. To make this argument, this article begins by expanding automation from its conventional technical purview to better appreciate its overlooked embodied dimensions. Accordingly, through the examples of on-demand mobility and delivery platforms, I explain how automation can be understood as a specific structure of feeling immanent to on-demand platform urbanism that is transforming city life and creating distinctive subjectivities. This article takes as its empirical focus the unravelling of these embodied dimensions of automation, which has been exacerbated by the gradual rollback of COVID-19 restrictions in Melbourne. My argument is that a felt sense of disaffection by both workers and consumers is effectively deautomating this form of on-demand platform capitalism. The article concludes that disaffection in this context has a potentially recuperative dimension, opening up alternative urban futures that were previously unthinkable.

The urban political ecology of the commons or commoning as a socio-natural process: The case of the Peri-Urban Gardening group in Thessaloniki

This paper casts the foundations for the development of an urban political ecology of the commons, drawing on the case of a guerrilla gardening initiative in Thessaloniki, Greece. In doing so, it draws on the literature of urban political ecology and its ontological and epistemological underpinnings and argues for a reconceptualisation of urban commoning as a socio-natural, productive process. Understanding commoning as inherently socio-natural, the product of discursive and material practices, opens new horizons for both academic research and activist engagement in efforts to imagine and build alternative urban futures. The commoning practices of the Peri-Urban Gardening Group of Karatassou, in Thessaloniki, serve as a heuristic case study for the development of a holistic methodological framework that uncovers the equal significance of discursive and material commoning practices and processes.

Urban/image: Conceptualizing Amsterdam as urban environment in virtual renderings

This article proposes that virtual renderings of speculative architectural projects provide a crucial entry point into the reimagination of sustainable urban life through the production of nature(s) within the city. Drawing on case studies of ‘sustainable’ building projects in and around Amsterdam, The Netherlands, I aim to trace the entanglement of virtual and real environments in imagining green futures. With the concept of the ‘render ghost’, James Bridle situates the people inhabiting virtual renderings ‘in the liminal space between the present and the future, the real and the virtual, the physical and the digital’ (2013). Similarly, the imaginations of nature within virtual renderings of sustainable buildings are situated at a point of in-between, a constant state of becoming. More than just visualizing their respective architectural design, the virtual renderings visualize these designs in a specific space, a specific environment – and how that environment could and would change through the spatial presence of these buildings. What makes these immaterial elements – ranging from computer-generated images to virtual renderings and augmented reality applications – particularly productive as research objects is the subjective nature of the atmosphere created in and through them, an atmospheric imagination of sustainable futures embedded in what Degen et al. call a ‘field of negotiation, tension and ambivalence’ (2017). Atmospheric in their imagination of urban environments, contingent in their temporality between the past, the present and the future, and ambiguous in their spatial grounding in simultaneously specific and generic surroundings, virtual renderings arguably allow for an engagement with the possibilities of alternative urban futures.

Collaborative survival in the city: Envisioning alternative urban futures through Black agrarian praxis

Urban inhabitants exist within hybrid spaces of continual transformation and metabolism where human labor is woven into the work of the trees, the grass, the water cycle. The built environment – concrete, houses, skyscrapers – butts up against urban riparian zones and wetlands. The postindustrial landscape exposes both the possibilities and the limits of building resilience in the context of constant metabolism and change. This article asks about the potential for collaborative survival in these spaces of deindustrialization, where the abundance of so-called vacant parcels represent a pathway toward more self-determined food systems and the potential for reimagined urban futures. I play with the concept of collaborative survival to consider a plurality of epistemologies, knowledge systems, and traditions, as well as histories and geographies of exclusion that contribute to this reimagining. I examine the work of Black gardeners and farmers in Cleveland, OH as an example of collaborative survival: their work within a changing environment to grow food for themselves and their community, producing the city around them as a socio-ecological hybrid. Urban food production, in this case, serves as a praxis and a knowledge frame for liberation and emancipation. This paper explores urban agrarianism among Black residents in light of two historical moments that have deeply impacted Cleveland, and that I argue have shaped and informed Black agrarian praxis and growers' urban imaginaries. Collaborative survival recognizes that processes of urban development are ongoing and immanent and contests developmentalist narratives that marginalize epistemologies embracing alternative urban futures. Examining Black growers' experiences with attention to a framing around survival and resilience highlights the continuity of structural and systemic racism and violence against Black and brown bodies, as well as the innovations that individuals and groups deploy to contest that violence.

New Insights, New Rules: What Shapes the Iterative Design of an Urban Planning Game?

Games have become established tools within participatory urban planning practice that provide safe spaces for collective actions such as deliberation, negotiation of conflicting agendas, scenario testing, and collaborative worldbuilding. While a body of literature on the effectiveness of games to address complex urban planning issues is emerging, significantly less literature addresses the design and development process of serious games with a possible space in its own right within urban planning practice. Our study investigates long term iterative processes of designing a game for visioning urban futures, specifically, how design iterations connect to the application of games in practice by accommodating or responding to emerging needs, goals, and relationships. We approach this topic through the case study of the Sustainability Futures Game, a game designed by the Helsinki-based creative agency Hellon to support business leaders, sustainability specialists, and city officials to imagine desirable alternative urban futures. Through storytelling and collective worldbuilding, players first imagine what sustainable urban living means for a specific city, frame their vision using the UN’s sustainable development goals, and finally create concrete pathways towards reaching these goals. This article uses a genealogical approach to systematically analyse the five design iterations of the Sustainability Futures Game. It aims to elucidate the contextual and relational influences on the application of serious games in urban planning practice to understand how these influences might encourage or inhibit their potential to foster transformation towards sustainable futures.

Controversing the datafied smart city: Conceptualising a ‘making-controversial’ approach to civic engagement

In this paper, we propose the concept of controversing as an approach for engaging citizens in debates around the datafied city and in shaping responsible smart cities that incorporate diverse public values. Controversing addresses the engagement of citizens in discussions about the datafication of urban life by productively deploying controversies around data. Attempts to engage citizens in the smart city frequently involve ‘neutral’ data visualisations aimed at making abstract sociotechnical issues more tangible. In addition, citizens are meant to gather around issues already defined externally by others. Instead, we focus on how people might become engaged and develop the capacity to shape alternative urban futures. We suggest that making controversial apparently less contentious issues in the smart city allows people to identify their own issues, come together temporarily as a public, imagine alternative possibilities and thus develop capacities for action. In this context, controversies can act as agents of change and open up new spaces for participation and action. We develop the notion of controversing as a deliberate strategy of making datafication controversial, and operationalise the term along the dimensions of recontextualisation, meaning-making and agency. We then look at two cases from the mid-sized city of Amersfoort in the Netherlands, first to test the conceptual potential of controversing to expose how frictions shape citizen engagement, and second to analyse how controversing may frame design-oriented methods aimed at involving diverse participants in discussing datafication and defining public values in the datafied smart city.

Limits on city size and related topics

This paper examines several concepts and applications that influence city and urban development. The purpose is to explore the limits to city and urban growth. These urban expansions are reflected in the growth of Charleston SC and Portland OR through their changes in night light expression. These concepts include carrying capacity, growth or cordon boundaries, agglomeration, technological change and human ingenuity and innovation. A conclusion of this review is that history suggests that there is no strong evidence that urban growth can be limited either in scale or extent. Alternative urban futures are created with a no limits assumption due to the positive reinforcing effects of agglomeration as against the limiting assumption of controlled growth. However, technology and human ingenuity operate to produce a larger and more dispersed urban landscape. Discussion and conclusions follow this qualitative analysis.

Sonic Heritage, Identity and Music-making in Sheffield, “Steel City”

ABSTRACT This paper examines the way pervasive influences within the built environment shape heritage and identity. With a focus on Sheffield, a northern English city strongly associated with a now largely defunct steel industry, the paper investigates how the city’s industrial past, its location and social fabric have shaped music-making, creating a distinctive scene that has become central to the city’s cultural identity. Using a combination of in-depth interviews and documentary analysis, Sheffield is presented from the mid-1970s as experiencing what can be referred to as a “sonic cycle” in which the city’s musicians refer to the sound of the drop-hammer in the steel forges being a backdrop to their childhood and a clear influence as they began their musical careers, and how the “industrial music” scene which they created has in turn shaped a new heritage identity. The paper concludes by promoting the idea that music created by local musicians forms a vital part of Sheffield’s character and is an essential ingredient for shaping alternative urban futures.

The future in the past: colonial modernity as urban heritage in contemporary Indonesia

ABSTRACT Across urban Indonesia, the surviving vestiges of ‘modern’ architecture and infrastructure built in the final decades of colonial rule are increasingly being re-defined as ‘heritage’. Through an ethnographic study of Pasar Johar – a striking marketplace in the city of Semarang designed by the Dutch architect and town planner Thomas Karsten in the 1930s – I argue that such cases of modernity-cum-heritage enable the contemporary challenge of hegemonic teleologies of what makes a ‘modern’ city, while also facilitating the perpetuation of insidious colonial-era notions of who counts as a ‘modern’ urban subject. By tracing the ‘afterlives’ of the marketplace and its Dutch creator in present-day debates over the trajectory of Semarang’s development, this article reveals how Indonesian heritage advocates are endeavouring to chart alternative urban futures via their city’s past. Through their lively campaign to save the structure, ‘being modern’ in the postcolonial city comes to be a project not of imitation but of recovery, as well as a passionate critique of urban politics as usual. However, such enthusiastic reclamations of colonial modernity as urban heritage also run the risk of reproducing the same logics of ‘progress’ that once governed the cityscape and its populace a century ago.

Neighbourhood artistic disaffiliation in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

This article argues that the creative drive of cultural workers to envision alternative urban futures and to make real changes in neighbourhoods in the urban present, while politically powerful and imaginatively seductive to urban decision-makers, contains destructive impulses. Such a drive can challenge, but also reinforce, the established social order and unequal power relations. This article critically examines the spatial politics of creative destruction that can unfold in the place-making wake of cultural workers. A case study is used from the mid-sized, industrial city of Hamilton of a deprived inner-city neighbourhood that is informally being reimagined as an arts district. In this neighbourhood, some cultural workers selectively practice middle-class disaffiliation. Individual acts of avoidance, control and destruction function as withdrawal strategies to help minimise the negative externalities of crime and social disorder and to realise a vision of this neighbourhood in their own image.

Co-Performances of Bodies and Buildings: Compagnie Willi Dorner’s Bodies in Urban Spaces and fitting and Asphalt Piloten’s Around the Block

Street performances disrupt everyday activities in public spaces and challenge the status quo with propositions of alternative possible worlds. While many street performances rely upon urban public spaces and architecture as a way to expose normative behavioral codes and social constructions of seemingly neutral spaces, Compagnie Willi Dorner and Asphalt Piloten focus attention on re -placing the human body in and on city buildings to interrogate the complex materiality of urban architecture and imagine symbiotic links between bodies and buildings that revise expectations about city life. Their ephemeral performance installations appear to merge bodies and buildings, enabling the artists to dispute notions of architectural solidity and durability, to suggest the possibility of human thing-ness, and thus to question ways of inhabiting the city. Key to political engagement is that these artists create events in which the public, consciously or unconsciously, can re -view the workings of the city, and initiate debate (in words or actions) about the city’s priorities, processes, and agendas. The possible worlds suggested by Compagnie Willi Dorner and Asphalt Piloten are not completed projects, but rather stimuli for inquiry into alternative urban futures because they invite audiences to enter a reciprocal relationship between bodies and buildings that acknowledges mutual growth, change, and dependence. These alternatives enable the spectator to experience previously unimagined possible worlds—some optimistic, some exceedingly pessimistic.

Provincializing Global Urbanism: A Manifesto

“To thematize requires a project to select its objects, deploy them in a bounded field, and submit them to disciplined inquiry” (Guha, 1997, xv) Mainstream urban scholarship envisions urbanization as a global process that is best achieved via the worldwide application of the development mechanisms pioneered in the advanced capitalist countries—currently, those of neoliberal globalization. Yet the repeated failure of this vision to deliver on its promise of wealth for all and ecological sustainability compels urban scholars to rethink mainstream presumptions. By means of a ten-point manifesto, we argue that provincializing global urbanism creates space from which to challenge urban theories that treat “northern” urbanization as the norm, to incorporate the expertise and perspectives of urban majorities, and to imagine and enact alternative urban futures.

To Inhabit Well: Counterhegemonic Movements and the Right to the City

A right to the city, understood as a conjoint claim to a right to inhabit urban space well, can be an effective starting point from which diverse urban movements can begin to build broad counterhegemonic coalitions for alternative urban futures. In this article, I argue that the right to the city supports the project of establishing relations of equivalence among members of coalitions––balancing relations of sameness/difference and interdependence/autonomy.

Rhythm and Noise: The City, Memory and the Archive

Henri Lefebvre's Rhythmanalysis, while typically loose and underdeveloped as a work, offers a highly suggestive way of thinking about mobility and pattern within spatiality, and also alerts our attention to the importance of temporal rhythms. This paper is concerned with the rhythms of history within the city, notably how heritage gets made, remade and unmade within the city as a form of archive. Comparing Lefebvre's concept of rhythm to that of noise in Michel Serres (notably in his book Genesis), I explore the meaning of urban heritage – in which the past is made present – analysing how the past can interrupt the present within the city and how that opens up possibilities for critical reception and potential alternative urban futures.

Review: Recapturing Democracy—Neoliberalization and the Struggle for Alternative Urban Futures, by Mark Purcell. New York and London: Routledge. 2008. 208 pages. $31.95 (paperback)

Review: Recapturing Democracy—Neoliberalization and the Struggle for Alternative Urban Futures, by Mark Purcell. New York and London: Routledge. 2008. 208 pages. $31.95 (paperback)

Modes of Engagement for Urban Research: Enacting a Politics of Possibility

Cities are increasingly cast as being shaped by globalization and related neoliberal policies. While these diverse literatures have provided needed theoretical advancement to rethink the city in relation to political–economic change, they also run the risk of conceptualizing, studying, and representing cities without sufficient attention to the spatial copresence of multiple actors. The result is that some treatments of the city reproduce a unified story line that conceals human agency, reads as if there is only one trajectory on which all cities are moving, and does not engage in imagining alternative urban futures. In this paper we suggest that there is a continued need to critically examine the spatial narratives mobilized both by researchers as well as by the other actors they encounter. Drawing on the widespread idea that the stories which researchers tell are intimately linked with the conduct of research itself, we advocate a researcher mode of engagement that permits collaborative critique of projects that aim to transform urban space. We report on our experience with two research practices—grounded interviewing, and the public research memo—to provide empirical examples of our perspective.

Planning Histories, Urban Futures, and the World Trade Center Attack

This article seeks to explore the place of planning history in the discussion of the destruction of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 and of its aftermath. It is based on an analysis of a range of articles and messages published on this subject, particularly within a month of the attack: newspapers, a planning Web site, a listserv for urban historians, and academic planning journals. After indicating the types of presence that planning and urban histories have had in the post-9/11 discourse, the article outlines some of the debates on urban futures—and assumptions about urban pasts— that have been common in this period, before concluding with observations on the various identities of those involved in these discussions. The article not only seeks to assess the lessons from this retrospective process of looking toward the “ghosts” of wars and reconstructions past but also examines how these—as well as planning history—have been instrumentalized to imagine alternative urban futures.

The Future as a Learning Exercise in Geography

Abstract This article describes a series of exercises concerning the future that can be utilized in geographic education. Future studies have the advantages of a relatively high level of student involvement, a strong inducement to thinking in terms of systems, and opportunities to introduce the geographic approach to a problem. Exercises include the design of the human ecology of an island, the investigation of alternative urban futures, the evaluation of the effects of different theories of social change, the design of immediate changes in the man made environment that will improve the future environment, and the evaluation of the effects of advancing technology and retreating technology.