CITY OF REPAIR: Practicing the Future in Mexico City

In 1991, the Malaysian Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohamad, announced Vision 2020 to make the country 'fully developed' by that year. Launched during a period of rapid economic growth, Vision 2020 legitimized Mahathir's developmental penchant for spectacular urban megaprojects and ambitious technological experimentation. While hopes of reaching Vision 2020's crude GDP targets were dashed even before the end of the 1990s (largely as a result of the Asian financial crisis), and Mahathir stepped down from office in 2003, the year 2020 retained significance as a horizon of expectation for a generation of Malaysians. In this Interventions essay I look back at three decades of Vision 2020 from the temporal vantage point of 2020. The lead-up to that year saw political, popular and artistic retrospection on Vision 2020, spurred in part by nonagenarian Mahathir's return to power. Contextually, 'Where is the future?' articulates unrealized technological and developmental expectations from peak Vision 2020. Conceptually, the essay offers a critical geography of political futures past--demonstrating the constitutive spatiality of future expectations and the diverse ways in which elite developmental visions are engaged in life geographies, spaces of experience and representational practices.

Section: Post‐mahathir Futures?mentioning

confidence: 99%

WHERE IS THE FUTURE? Geography, Expectation and Experience across Three Decades of Malaysia's Vision 2020

Bunnell¹

2022

“…Institutionalized rational planning has medium and long‐term horizons that are linear and sequential, while other urban realities escape this rationality. Boudreau's analysis of Mexico City (2022, this issue) shows alternative modalities of dealing with divergent futures: long‐term rational anticipation versus intuitive improvisation as real‐time foresight (Cunha, 2012). Protestors against the Malaysia 2020 project opposed the regime's city vision, and Naruka's analysis (2022, this issue) of conflicts within the bureaucracy of Delhi's urban planning authority on the Yamuna riverfront plan revealed a mismatch between divergent visions of futures.…”

Section: Breaking the Path‐dependence Of The Institutionalization Of ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

THE FUTURE SCENARIOS OF CITIES: An Analysis of their Institutional Construction

González‐Arellano¹

2022

In recent decades, a dominant narrative has emerged in which cities are considered the most decisive places for the future of contemporary societies. In fact, institutional production of such futures grants cities a central function in the becoming of the world. The objective of this essay is to analyze and characterize the institutional construction of future scenarios for cities based on three dimensions, or pillars, of a proposal for an institutional analysis. These dimensions are regulatory, normative and cognitive. The construction of future scenarios can be useful for cities, but it is important to recognize that they are institutional constructions that respond to the interests of individuals or groups and thus reflect visions of the present that reveal the concerns and strategic dimensions of certain actors. In this essay I analyze and characterize a corpus of 101 future scenarios for 81 cities in different countries. The results demonstrate that the future scenarios for cities are institutionalized through the development of regulatory functions, value systems and cognitive and cultural frameworks for organizations and individuals.

“…Instead, the knowledge that is built to produce Groy stems mostly from communities of practitioners educated in Anglo‐American institutions, and follows a clear positivistic stance. Groy thus also fails to incorporate local histories or knowledge gained through what Julie‐Anne Boudreau (2022, this issue) calls ‘street epistemology’—situated knowledge from an ethnographic gaze that accounts for the ‘articulation between the body, the house, and the street’. By building on positivistic economic data for de‐risking that necessarily need to be standardized, the logics of futuring we introduced quintessentially conflict with the integration of different knowledge projects.…”

Section: A Postcolonial Critique Of Groymentioning

confidence: 99%

URBAN VISIONS OF GLOBAL CLIMATE FINANCE: Dispossessive Mechanisms of Futuring in the Making of Groy

Hilbrandt¹,

Grafe²

2022

We thank Sarah Knuth, Zac Taylor, Emma Colven and Enora Robin for their close reading, critical commentary and helpful suggestions, which improved earlier drafts of this essay that we were able to discuss at 'The Urban Political Ecologies of Climate Finance' online workshop in 2020. Additionally, we are grateful to Julie Ren and Silvy Chakkalakal for their extremely useful commentary and for editorial support. The research for and writing of this essay was supported by the Swiss National Foundation (grant number 10001A_197113/1).