Speaker
Description
Urban planning is traditionally concerned with envisioning urban futures across different temporal horizons, scales, and value systems. ‘Official imaginaries’ refer to narratives and discourses in policy and planning documents, such as strategic plans, masterplans, and sustainability policies, which shape official discourses directly or indirectly. In urban planning, they reflect dominant ideas about the relationship between humans, nature, and technology – they are not neutral but reflect, define and legitimize specific visions of urban futures (Jasanoff, 2015; Matheney et al., 2024). These imaginaries, materialized in different plans and strategies, have been guiding models and critiques in urban planning, helping planners to conceptualize what cities could or should be, reflecting both local social, economic and political priorities and global policy agendas. For example, several cities, especially large urban centers, are increasingly seeking to (re)brand themselves as desirable “smart”, “green” or “creative” cities, reflecting visions of global competitiveness and economic growth, while at the same time appealing to sustainability discourses (Lindner & Meissner, 2019). In light of the need to build transformative change in a world in constant transformation and with interconnected crises, old and new narratives around the integration of nature in cities and, ultimately, human-nature relationships, have increasingly gained space in debates about urban futures through concepts such as garden cities, green infrastructure, and nature-based solutions, to name a few. Central to this transformative vision are the imaginaries embodied in urban planning policies, which define how nature is valued, integrated and imagined in the cities of the future. However, the concept of ‘nature’ in urban planning often lacks explicit definition (de Oliveira, 2025). Different meanings and values of nature shape the way planning policies articulate future urban imaginaries, influencing not only the relationship between humans and nature, but also the inclusiveness and the equity of proposed transformations and their transformative potential.
This study, part of the NATURESCAPES project, examines the imaginaries embedded in urban policy documents such as strategic plans, master plans, and sustainability strategies, and analyzes how they frame nature’s role in urban futures. Through comparative analysis of eight Functional Urban Areas (FUAs) in Europe, Latin America, and North America, this research investigates how these imaginaries have evolved over two decades. Employing semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis, it explores the narratives that policies use to prioritize certain values of nature while marginalizing others. Our analytical framework examines these official imaginaries based on a typology that addresses the values and meanings attributed to urban nature and human-nature relations, building upon the IPBES Values Assessment (IPBES, 2022) in which three specific values of nature are identified: intrinsic, relational, and instrumental (“nature for nature”, “nature as culture”, and “nature for society”, respectively) (Mansur et al., 2022). We explore dimensions of justice and agency by highlighting which and whose values are discussed in literatures relating to values of urban nature, and the potential for other-than-human perspectives to contribute to shifting worldviews to enable transformative change. Given the potential of imaginaries to stimulate innovation in urban planning, our findings highlight the different conditions under which contrasting future imaginaries in official planning narratives lead to maintaining the status quo, or, contrarily, to challenging entrenched norms, integrating diverse values, and guiding transformative actions.
References
de Oliveira, F. L. (2025). Nature in nature-based solutions in urban planning. Landscape and Urban Planning, 256, 105282. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2024.105282
IPBES. (2022). Methodological Assessment Report on the Diverse Values and Valuation of Nature of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (P. Balvanera, U. Pascual, M. Christie, B. Baptiste, & D. Gonzalez-Jimenez, Eds.). IPBES Secretariat.
Jasanoff, S., & Kim, S.-H. (2015). Dreamscapes of Modernity. In Dreamscapes of Modernity. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226276663.001.0001
Lindner, C., & Meissner, M. (2019). The Routledge Companion to Urban Imaginaries. Routledge.
Mansur, A. V., McDonald, R. I., Güneralp, B., Kim, H. J., de Oliveira, J. A. P., Callaghan, C. T., Hamel, P., Kuiper, J. J., Wolff, M., Liebelt, V., Martins, I. S., Elmqvist, T., & Pereira, H. M. (2022). Nature futures for the urban century: Integrating multiple values into urban management. Environmental Science and Policy, 131, 46–56. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2022.01.013
Matheney, A., Anguelovski, I., Kotsila, P., Sekulova, F., & Oscilowicz, E. (2024). Illuminating radical spatial imaginaries: Counter-mapping urban environmental justice struggles for the city yet to come. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486241270092
| Keywords | urban futures; imaginaries; nature-based solutions |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
