Abstract:  The question of what becomes of urban future‐making when a city loses its institutional anchor has received insufficient scholarly attention. This article addresses this gap through the concept of lostness—developed here as an analytical alternative to deficit‐oriented frameworks such as shrinkage or decline. Lost cities are settlements that, following large‐scale disruption, have been displaced from the purview of state or corporate control and expert‐driven urban development, and find themselves in search of new trajectories. Rather than a condition of passivity or failure, lostness may engender distinctive, place‐based forms of agency—and, in some cases, a deliberate resistance to being “found” and absorbed into systems that do not serve local interests. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at JHQ Rheindahlen, Germany—a former joint headquarters of British Forces and the NATO Northern Army Group, operational from 1954 to 2013 and now poised between abandonment and a deferred state and federal development agenda—the article examines how residents continue to enact futures despite their marginalisation from formal planning. Engaging theories of minor futures, projective grammars, and temporal disenfranchisement, we demonstrate that institutional withdrawal does not suspend future‐making but fundamentally reconfigures its character. Expert visions tend toward conclusive futures with defined endpoints and abstract assessments of value, while residents articulate minor futures through transgressive spatial appropriations, informal memory practices, and a persistent prioritisation of use‐value and accessibility. These two orders of future‐making rarely enter into direct dialogue, producing an asymmetry of recognition we term “limited inclusion”—with significant implications for inclusive urban planning and governance.

Keywords:  future‐making; lostness; minor futures; post‐military landscapes; projective grammars

Published:   29 June 2026

Issue:   Vol 11 (2026): Urban Futures in Times of Disruption (In Progress)