Vision Making in Large Urban Settings: Unleashing Anticipation?

Abstract

Our society will increasingly be an urban society, with large metropolitan regions as the centers of development. These metropolitan spaces are supposed to create the economic and technological dynamics to solve the problems of the very same urban society. They are extremely complex structures, overall, difficult to understand in all their dimensions and asking for new ways of management, strategy formation, and general politics: “if we cannot imagine, we cannot manage.” Stakeholders, citizens, and planners alike will be faced with the challenge to develop appropriate ideas guiding the dynamics and complex settings and to keep development horizons open for not yet anticipated trajectories. Vision-making processes become very important in such a context, in the best case creating open political horizons, interested in becoming and the “midwifing of futures.” A survey of 30 vision-making processes in Europe forms the empirical backcloth for a presentation and discussion of urban systems, vision-making documents, time horizons and instant futures, vision formulations, and the “perpetual pursuit of unknowable novelty.”