Urban Future-Making in Times of Polycrisis and Disruption: Agency and Specificities

When pandemics, military conflicts, democratic backsliding, and the climate crisis compromise social, political, and material life, individual and collective futures become acute and need reconsideration. While some of these threats are not new, their intersection creates unprecedented challenges for cities and their inhabitants. This ubiquity of disruptions, referred to as polycrisis, has not only worldly effects but also challenges epistemic and ontological assumptions (Hilbrandt & Ren, 2025).

Given this context, urban future-making requires a realignment of knowledge production, including the role of scholars, methodologies, and vocabularies used to grasp urban futures. Proposing a thematic issue on urban future(s)-making, we assume that the future is neither linear nor single (Adam & Groves, 2007; Datta, 2019; Urry, 2016). Its various trajectories are produced in different "presents'' and rooted in different "pasts." The ubiquitous disruptions raise the question: Are urban futures inevitably fragmented due to uncertainty and inability to achieve consensus, or are common and collective futures still possible?

The thematic issue focuses on the agency and specificity of future-making in times of disruption. Contributions will illuminate which agents are involved/excluded from developing and implementing urban futures across various cities and political systems, what struggles unfold over urban futures, and on what scale these struggles take place. By emphasizing the agency of individuals, families, and communities as future-makers (Kemmer & Simone, 2021; Zhelnina, 2023), the thematic issue questions the dominance of the states, corporations, and urban experts in determining urban futures. Additionally, by centering the temporalities of disruption, we unpack the implications of the polycrisis for classical theories of urban future-making that assume continuity, peace, and progress rather than disruption or regression.

Hence, through a diverse set of contributions, this thematic issue seeks to explicate the complexities and controversies of urban future-making. We encourage scholars with a risk background (including but not limited to experiences of forced migration, war, natural disasters, or political crises) to share their perspectives.

References:

Adam, B., & Groves, C. (2007). Future matters: Action, knowledge, ethics. Brill.

Datta, A. (2019). Postcolonial urban futures: Imagining and governing India’s smart urban age. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 37(3), 393–410. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775818800721

Hilbrandt, H., & Ren, J. (2025). Doing urban geography in times of crisis: Introduction to the forum “Urban geography in times of crisis.” Geographica Helvetica, 80(1), 23–29. https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-80-23-2025

Kemmer, L., & Simone, A. (2021). Standing by the promise: Acts of anticipation in Rio and Jakarta. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 39(4), 573–589. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775820982997

Urry, J. (2016). What is the future? John Wiley & Sons.

Zhelnina, A. (2023). Making urban futures at your kitchen table: Temporalities of an urban renewal controversy in Moscow. City & Community, 22(2), 145–162. https://doi.org/10.1177/15356841221135171

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