To Math the Gantry of an Uncertain Urban Future

Abstract

We commence on a position that even the very notion of futures assumes ‘stability’ and ‘constants’ even if in short time scales. When the winds of futures sweep every corner of the city, the rural or peri urban like a wind that contaminates everything in its course - perhaps, the future is not a ‘place in time’ yet a ‘place in space’. This suggests a shift from futures as not only a temporal consideration, yet also a spacio- consideration. The shift to think from place in futures work is borne out of the perception that futures are often floated in the ‘temporal’ whereas the future is ‘spatio-temporal’. In other words, we should be grappling with the question of time from particular locales – including people, space and practices. The contribution looks at the application of futures at a trans-local scale plotted against time. We work within the frame of 2024 – 2065. The contemporary planning and policy instruments are reconfigured and radically re-interpreted to allow for a hyper-responsive and imaginative means to conjure futures, for and from today – deliberately working here and there, now and then, slow and fast. The work suggests a methodology of building a framework for responsive, actions by a multitude of immediate actors that are incrementally building a scaffold for deep co-habitation. The work is explored through speculative narrative, story-telling, forensic ethnography, drawings and immersive installations. The methods deliberately seek to bring into proximity various scales of time, place and agency and creatively and experimentally transcend each other. The gantry becomes a useful ‘device’ with which we attend to shifting scales, uncertain truths and volatile stakes.