Speaker
Description
This contribution lies on a relational understanding of spatial imaginaries as collective understandings of socio-spatial practices produced through political struggles over the conceptions, perceptions and lived experiences of place (Davoudi, 2018). As an expression of power relations, the need to negotiate different and conflicting spatial imaginaries has emerged in recent planning practices (Haughton & Allmendinger 2015; Crawford 2018, Lingua 2022).
Moreover, the efficacy of spatial imaginaries lies in their institutionalisation. This term is widely used in social theory to refer to the process of embedding concepts, social roles, values or modes of behaviour within an organisation, social system, or society as a whole (Waterout, 2008). In strategic spatial planning, the institutionalisation of spatial imaginaries covers their capacity to travel across significant institutional sites of urban and regional governance. Whitin these processes, spatial imaginaries are subject to processes of creation and destruction: they can be replaced by a new imaginary that has gained primacy in the meantime and, in some cases, they can later be re-appropriated and reenergized, even in transfigured forms. However, this reading of the “evolution” or “involution” of competing and “winning vs losing” spatial imaginaries does not take into account the kind of futures they envision.
In this contribution, we put into tension the proposal of Augustin et al. (2019) to distinguish between “near” and “distant” futures with Sorensen’ reading of path dependency (2014). The dichotomy near/distant seems to be quite promising in terms of connecting spatial imaginaries to different images of futures, where distance is not a matter of merely extending the time horizon, but points to qualitatively different processes of envisioning the future and orienting action, even toward disruption in path dependencies
By referring to different experiences of envisioning the future of the City of Florence after the pandemic, we will provide an excursus on the relation among path dependencies and future thinking in cities with an ancient past, and we will discuss how spatial imaginaries that envision a distant future have different features than those that envisage a near future, whereas distance refers to how close or critical a future is to contingent experience and social convention and expectations.
References
Augustine G., Soderstrom S., Milner D., Weber K., (2019), Constructing A Distant Future: Imaginaries in Geoengineering, Academy of Management Journal, 62(6), 1930–1960.
Crawford, J. (2018). Constructing ‘the coast’: The power of spatial imaginaries. Town Planning Review, 89(2), 108–112.
Davoudi, S. (2018). Imagination and spatial imaginaries: A conceptual framework. Town Planning Review, 89(2), 97-124.
Haughton, G. and P. Allmendinger (2015), Fluid spatial imaginaries: evolving estuarial city-regional spaces. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 39.5, 857-873.
Lingua, V. (2022). Enhancing Spatial Imaginaries of Metropolitan Renaissance: A Regional Design Approach. Sustainability, 14(13), 7628.
Waterhout B. (2008), The institutionalisation of European spatial planning, Delft University Press.
Watkins, J. (2015). Spatial imaginaries research in geography: Synergies, tensions, and new directions. Geography Compass, 9(9), 508–522.
Sorensen, A. (2014). Taking path dependence seriously: an historical institutionalist research agenda in planning history. Planning Perspectives, 30(1), 17–3
| Keywords | future thinking; distant futures; path dependency; diruption; visioning; futuring |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
