Speculation

Having explored themes and questions of Memory (2022–2024) our attention turns to ways that urban futures are formulated, understood and imagined through the processes and practices of speculation. This theme responds first and foremost to a contemporary era dominated by financial capitalism and how urban space, seemingly everywhere, has been subject to new and heightened speculative ventures seeking accumulation and profit with accompanying marginalisation and displacement pressures. 

Speculation or more specifically, 'speculative urbanism', provides a means to make sense of often dramatic urban land transformations with real estate markets and property becoming increasingly intertwined with global financial networks through new forms, processes and instruments of investment, governance and expertise. This is most readily visible in the speculative landscapes of mega-projects and large-scale developments across cities worldwide but is also apparent in the way many urban governments increasingly use speculative financial tools and logic to manage their budgets and associated activities.

But at the same time, speculation needs to be understood as operating beyond a nexus of finance, real estate and governance. It shapes many fundamental aspects of our social, political, technical and emotional lives. All sorts of urban actors, intermediaries and devices participate in anticipating, navigating and challenging the future’s radical uncertainties beyond city administrators, property developers and financial specialists. Everyday speculative activities are often central to crafting and sustaining urban livelihoods and improvising forms of care and connection. Urban speculative imaginations and imaginative capacities become crucial in an era of increasing uncertainty to deal with the future’s indeterminacy and to develop new social and political possibilities and counter-speculations. Speculative urbanism is also interested in tracing the multiple ways urban inhabitants disrupt the speculative city and prefigure more socially and ecologically just urban futures. 

Speculative urbanism is an invitation to imagine the urban through the lenses of artistic and design-based research – speculative practices that guide multiple repertoires to envision alternative urban entanglements. Placing speculation more centrally within urban studies will require new cross-disciplinary conversations and intersections that range widely, involving ideas and approaches from not just economic geography, planning and sociology but also digital humanities, design, fiction, religion, philosophy, art, computer studies and beyond. The wager is that grappling with forms of urban speculation requires more speculative approaches to engaging with cities and urban life.
 

Image: Collage by Catalina Ortiz