How to plan for discontinuity? Equipping ‘anticipatory assemblages’ with ‘archives of the future’

Abstract

For more than two decades, critical planning scholars have called for strategic spatial planning to cut its rational roots stemming from the 1960s–70s, and counter its tendency towards more incremental approaches of the 1980s–2000s. To truly address the core challenges of cities and regions in our times, spatial planning should plan for discontinuity. This paper explores how planning may embrace futuring practices to do so. Drawing on three materially oriented futuring approaches, ‘Critical Future Studies’, ‘Sociology of Expectations’, and ‘Sociology of the Future’, futuring practices may serve a threefold aim. First, exposing the power of ‘normalisation’, unlocking silenced futures. Second, providing a stage to exhibit and dramatise ‘future expectations’ (stories, images, artefacts) and their stakeholder connections. Third, letting urban materiality and corporeality truly speak for themselves to the present and the future, opening experiences of, and confrontations with, the technological, environmental and geographical unconscious. Consequently, we show how such futuring can take shape through the creation of an ‘Archive of the Future’, which we illustrate through Rotterdam as a case.