Speculative urbanism

Abstract

The way we tend to conceive of speculation, not surprisingly, is very much tied to the operations of finance: the futures it anticipates, and the chances taken on those futures for the sake of capital accumulation. When we bring these questions to the urban, our attention often turns first to how finance is mobilized to realize opportunities for accumulation in the real estate sector. Indeed, it seems that everywhere we look today, we find extended circuits of financial processes, instruments, and intermediaries pulsating through urban space as they seek out, act upon, and invent possible (ostensibly better) futures. Yet as this collection of papers demonstrates, all focused primarily either on Jakarta, Indonesia, or Bengaluru, India, reducing speculative urbanism to the nexus of finance and real estate would be a limited and limiting move. This is a conjuncture in which everyone is speculating, from local land aggregators to kampung residents to state-owned enterprises to ride-hail drivers. Such varied attempts to reconfigure urban futures sometimes align with the efforts of financial markets to extract value from the notyet-world-class postcolonial city, but they also enact what Aimee Bahng (2018: 8) describes as "speculation from below…releasing speculation from capitalism's instrumentalization of futurity".Thus, while finance and real estate are indeed central to the work in this special issue, the articles collectively demonstrate that capitalocentric accounts of speculative urbanism are incomplete. In this brief commentary, I focus on how the work in this special issue 1) provides new vocabularies for speculative urbanism in addition to the domain of finance; 2) engages the temporalities of speculative urbanism, and; 3) offers methodological provocations for critical urban research. VocabulariesSpeculation 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). 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.

Unleashing speculative urbanism: Speculation and urban transformations

“…Third, investigating the workings of speculation on the ground makes visible alternative imaginaries, of how to live otherwise in cities, bringing urban temporalities to the fore (Fields, this issue). These include imaginaries that exceed the reach of capital (Summers and Fields, 2022), looking forward but also often animating past histories and cultural practices.…”