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Speculative urbanism

“…First, the work offers new concepts for theorizing speculation, opening the way toward analyses that encompass the relationships between finance and the socio-ecological, the socio-technical, and the everyday. The value of these novel vocabularies of speculation lies in how they attend to the operations of finance in cities without occluding wagers made on the future by those (human and non-human) living with the uncertainty these operations produce (Komporozos-Athanasiou, 2022). Second, the research gathered in this theme issue pushes us to look more closely at the temporalities of speculation as they are made material in the urban environment, resonating with recent efforts to critically engage speculative time and the politics of temporality (Adkins, 2017, Sharma, 2014).…”

“…Speculation is commonly associated with high risk/high reward forms of financial investment, focused on asset price fluctuations. While its risky nature makes the outcome of speculation uncertain, in the contemporary era of financial capitalism this uncertainty has become profoundly socially and politically generative, raising speculation to a wider cultural imperative and orientation (Bear, 2020; Komporozos-Athanasiou, 2022). In short, financialization cultivates a “speculative imagination,” or a “capacity to imagine under conditions of incalculable uncertainty; to bring forth new collective images of the future, which helps economies, societies, and polities navigate the present's volatile conditions” (Komporozos-Athanasiou, 2022: ix).…”

“…While its risky nature makes the outcome of speculation uncertain, in the contemporary era of financial capitalism this uncertainty has become profoundly socially and politically generative, raising speculation to a wider cultural imperative and orientation (Bear, 2020; Komporozos-Athanasiou, 2022). In short, financialization cultivates a “speculative imagination,” or a “capacity to imagine under conditions of incalculable uncertainty; to bring forth new collective images of the future, which helps economies, societies, and polities navigate the present's volatile conditions” (Komporozos-Athanasiou, 2022: ix). The papers in this special issue document the constructive work of the speculative imagination in postcolonial cities, giving us new conceptual vocabularies to work with.…”

“…Turning to Nowak's (2021) work on Jakarta's platform economy, we see how the network effects central to the expansion and value of venture capital-funded digital platforms also operate as a site of networked speculation from below. Nowak's paper centers ride-hail drivers as a speculative community (Komporozos-Athanasiou, 2022), leveraging digital networks created by platforms to autoconstruct mutual aid networks rooted in space and affinities. He documents how the speculative imagination operates to make the future actionable and livable in a present characterized by the cloudy legal status of motorbike taxis, the physical risks drivers face in their work, and the black-boxed nature of the platforms governing their livelihoods (Komporozos-Athanasiou, 2022, Nowak, 2021).…”

Speculative frictions: writing civic futures after AI

“…This tension inheres even in the word itself: “speculation” can signal a radical break from the present, but it is also the name for probabilistic practices that leverage the past to render the future more predictable and controllable (e.g. financial speculation and speculative governance; Keeling, 2019; Komporozos-Athanasiou, 2022). AI is an apt illustration of this contradiction.…”