Holding open the urban imagination

Source abstract

Urban studies has repeatedly depended on imaginative acts, even if its imaginative capacities have often remained implicit, unevenly distributed, or overshadowed by explanatory commitments to understanding cities as they are rather than as they might become. Can urban imagination still sustain urban futures in a time of geopolitical fragmentation, democratic uncertainty, and academic precarity? This debate paper introduces the special issue on Urban Imaginations and Urban Futures by proposing a conceptual and methodological reorientation of urban studies around the relationship between imagination and futures thinking. It argues that urban imagination should be understood not simply as a representational domain but as an enabling infrastructure through which urban futures are made thinkable, actionable, and contestable. Drawing on recent debates on crisis, infrastructure, urban uncertainty, southern praxis, and computational urbanism, the paper advances three propositions. First, imagination is conceptualized as a distributed capacity embedded across diverse urban sciences and practices, from everyday urbanism and architectural design to engineering and computational modelling. Second, fragments are proposed as methodological resources that enable interdisciplinary dialogue while sustaining epistemic plurality and critical engagement. Third, imagination is positioned as a critical means of reclaiming resilience from its technocratic uses by expanding the generative capacity of urban scholarship to engage uncertainty, plurality, and transformation, thereby helping keep urban futures open.