City planning provides a window onto aspects of urban futures, both in situ and at wider scales. Most straightforwardly, the process of planning involves efforts to realize a blueprint or vision of the future following a specified schedule. Through the critical lenses of scholars in the humanities and social sciences, however, plans and their often contested making and implementation can yield much more expansive insights into collective human engagement with futurity – about inherited historical framings of anticipated and aspirational futures, and about present anxieties, expectations and idealizations of the yet to come. In addition, to the extent that in any given context, aspects of another, existing city may be imagined as a desirable planning outcome, “the future” may already be said to be “out there”, and to have regulating effects, here and now. As such, both the temporality and the spatiality of the future associated with urban planning far exceeds the technical work of transforming a locality according to a linear timescale. In this project, we will carry out the foundational work required for longer-term examination of the histories and geographies of the future in Southeast Asia through the planning of four cities – what we term “capitals of the future”.

PI & Co-PI(s): Tim Bunnell, Nicholas Smith, Maitrii Aung-Thwin & Daniel Goh
Collaborator: Jessica Clendenning