IN-PERSON Manchester Livable Cities

Abstract

The history of urban sustainable design is a history of a field that has continually engaged with a design-politics of futurism. This paper builds on recent research (White, 2020; Edwards & Pettersen, 2023) exploring how the fields of architecture, planning, and design, as well as design-adjacent interventions in the critical social sciences, are contributing to post-carbon urban transition imaginaries and expanding our understandings of possible urban futures. We argue that elite architectural practices—such as those by the Bjarke Ingels Group and Heatherwick Studios—have embraced modes of urban design futuring that align with “green theming” and what we term “decorative ecomodernisms for the 1%.” However, this is not the only story to be told. We also examine a range of counter-hegemonic proposition and movements that are now gaining traction within architecture, planning, and design that seek alternatives to business-as-usual approaches, including designs for climate pragmatism, degrowth, a Green New Deal, and the pluriverse. Finally, we mark out how emerging design-led discussions around designs for carbon removal and designs to deal with planetary scale computing could alter and transform all these projects. These design-future imaginaries we suggest are important to pay attention to since they offer radically different views of how the possible urban politics of a post carbon society could materialize.