Speaker
Description
When it comes to the future of cities, it seems that much is currently shaped by an absolute imperative to act. The future seems to be everywhere, and, fundamentally, at stake (Wallace-Wells 2019). We understand urban future-making to mean purposeful decisions and actions that impact the urban built environment with the aim of engendering transformative change. The urgency to take far-reaching decisions and conceive of appropriate strategies and interventions aimed at the built environment involves, in particular, a group of experts, administrative staff and policy makers that we refer to as built environment professionals. We maintain that the urgency that these professionals face coexists with heightened uncertainties.
Uncertainty, typically, is conceptualized by distinguishing it from risk. While the latter is considered predictable and calculable, uncertainty essentially exhibits incalculability and fundamental openness (Scoones and Stirling, 2020). Technologies of forecasting and risk assessment have long sought to reduce uncertainty to a calculable range of possible outcomes in all spheres of economic action (Beckert, 2016). Indeed, the tools and techniques of built environment disciplines have been developed in the modern era exactly in order to reduce uncertainty and enable decision-making in the context of uncertainty (Wenzel et al. 2020). At present, dissolving spatial boundaries, contradictory time horizons, shifting organizational as well as institutional arrangements, and conflicting normative frameworks challenge the established routines of decision-making through which the agency of built environment professionals has played out in the past (e.g. Bulkeley 2021; Haarstad et al. 2023).
The paper seeks to develop an analytical framework for the agency of built environment professionals against the backdrop of simultaneously increasing urgency and uncertainty. We refer here to professionals from the disciplines of architecture, engineering, and planning as all-round ‘built environment professionals’, i.e. agents dealing with both material and strategic aspects of urban change (Grubbauer et al. 2024a). Building on different approaches to agency from sociology – agency as the opposite pole to structure – and business economics – agency as the knowledge advantage that contractors have against their clients – we outline the sources of agency that built environment professional have had traditionally as well as those developments that have tended to undermine these sources over the last decades (Grubbauer et al. 2024b).
Building on the above theoretical framework, the paper advances suggestions for how the classic built environment professionals – architects, civil engineers, urban planners – may become able either to reinvent or to newly develop their capacities to act: with more adaptive and experimental approaches; an engagement with broader and more diverse actor constellations (including an adoption of new roles in this regard); and a more proactive approach to tackling the future. This is illustrated with empirical vignettes derived from research on planning projects in different fields of urban transformation in the German context, namely mobility systems, housing, and material use. In conclusion, we argue that professional agency as to the future of cities will require recalibrating the relation between reflexivity and responsibility, i.e. rethinking the cognitive and normative foundations of professionals’ activity.
References
Beckert, J. (2016) Imagined Futures: Fictional Expectations and Capitalist Dynamics. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
Bulkeley, H. (2021) Climate Changed Urban Futures: Environmental Politics in the Anthropocene City. Environmental Politics 30.1–2, 266–84.
Grubbauer, M., L. Volont and A. Manganelli (2024a) Understanding Conflicts in Urban Future-Making: Arenas, Negotiation, and Affect. In: M. Grubbauer, A. Manganelli and L. Volont (eds.), Conflicts in Urban Future-Making: Governance, Institutions, and Transformative Change. Transcript, Bielefeld, 23–46.
Grubbauer, M., K. Manderscheid, and J. Thiel (2024b) Understanding Professional Agency in Urban Future-Making: Acting in the Face of Uncertainty. In: M. Grubbauer, A. Manganelli and L. Volont (eds.), Conflicts in Urban Future-Making: Governance, Institutions, and Transformative Change. Transcript, Bielefeld, 47–72.
Haarstad, H., J. Grandin, K. Kjærås, and E. Johnson (eds.) (2023) Haste: The Slow Politics of Climate Urgency. UCL Press, London.
Scoones, I. and A. Stirling (eds.) (2020) The Politics of Uncertainty: Challenges of Transformation. Routledge, London.
Wallace-Wells, D. (2019) The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future. Tim Duggan, New York.
Wenzel, M., H. Krämer, J. Koch, and A. Reckwitz (2020) Future and organization studies: On the rediscovery of a problematic temporal category in organizations. Organization Studies 41.10, 1441–55.
| Keywords | Urban futures; uncertainty; agency; professionals |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
