Timing the Future Metropolis

Timing the Future Metropolis--an intellectual history of planning, urbanism, design, and social science--explores the network of postwar institutions, formed amid specters of urban "crisis" and "renewal," that set out to envision the future of the American city. Peter Ekman focuses on one decisive node in the network: the Joint Center for Urban Studies, founded in 1959 by scholars at Harvard and MIT.
Through its sprawling programs of "organized research," its manifold connections to universities, foundations, publishers, and policymakers, and its years of consultation on the planning of a new city in Venezuela--Ciudad Guayana--the Joint Center became preoccupied with the question of how to conceptualize the urban future as an object of knowledge. By the 1970s, however, the Joint Center had become a leading incubator of neoconservative critics who questioned whether experts could ever know enough about that future to effect positive change.
Timing the Future Metropolis compels a broader reflection on temporality in urban planning, as Ekman rethinks how we might imagine cities yet to come--and the consequences of deciding not to.