Real-Fantasy

Urban planning—a balancing act towards a more or less realized fantasy. Depending on the emotional mix of the forecast that precedes the fantasy—weighted towards either more dystopian, or more optimistic feelings—the task may not always be to blindly aim for a bright future, but to resiliently focus away from the prediction, as a kind of anti-planning. In line with some of today’s most common future predictions—accelerated climate change, rising inequality, social collapse, among other apocalyptic scenarios. The prevailing overarching aim in urban planning should arguably be aligned to this anti focus, however, this does not seem to be the case.

The following speculations in this book are all based on a premonition that the planning response needed to soft-land the predicted dystopian consequences may not be compatible with the prominent underlaying motives of urban planning—the fantasy of economic growth. This particular fantasy, and its subsequent attempts to be realized, may even be a strong contributing factor enabling the more dystopian predictions to become real—scenarios that we should try to plan away from, if we could (or wanted to). Whether one chooses to see the inherent limitations of planning, or not, one could agree that the situation is of a more psychological nature than an “urban planning challenge” waiting to be solved.

In light of this, where does one go from here? Or more precisely: what´s left to cling on to when the very fundament of urban planning and its promises starts to wobble? This book is an attempt to investigate this possible space, by gentle observing the unstoppable transformation of conventional planning through the glass of this wobbliness—our ever-changing collective consciousness.