There is an urgency to cross-examine how cities are increasingly being produced not only as sites of memory and history, but as active sites of futuring, or places where urban futures are imagined, staged, tested, and normalized through specific techniques such as design, exhibition, digital mediation, ecological framing, and governance experimentation. Building on emerging scholarship that views cities as “truth spots” of the future amid the climate crisis and accelerated urbanization, our symposium foregrounded how futuring is materially and discursively enacted across new capital cities, administrative hubs, reclaimed industrial zones, and mega-urban extensions in Southeast Asia and beyond. Anchored in the Capitals of the Future research project, although focused on cases in Nusantara, Putrajaya, and key Singaporean districts, this symposium situated the discussion alongside global examples, such as Neom, Songdo, and Xiong’an. Participants critically examined how concepts such as smartness, innovation, spirituality, aesthetics, ecology, and governance are mobilized to legitimize particular visions of the future, often reworking ideas of the good life, social contracts, and human–nature relations. The symposium underscored the need to theorize futuring practices now, as these urban experiments increasingly shape lived realities, redistribute power, and foreclose or enable alternative futures in an era defined by climate uncertainty and rapid urban transformation.
The two-day symposium brought together 25 urban scholars worldwide under the thematic panels of futuring politics, smart city as method, worlding futuring, eco-futuring, utopian marginalities, and futuring strategies. In the concluding session, led by Dr. Bosman Batubara, ARI Research Fellow, the rich discussions were organized into four interrelated clusters, revealing how temporal urbanism is actively produced through different tools and practices, including narratives, technologies, planning documents, and infrastructure and spatial production. The first cluster foregrounded narratives as powerful instruments of futuring, showing how carefully scripted stories of progress, sustainability, and national destiny are mobilized to legitimize large-scale urban projects across cases from Songdo and Hanoi to Nusantara, demonstrated how narratives frame urban futures as desirable, inevitable, and economically necessary, often masking environmental risks and political contestation while rallying public support through appeals to innovation, pride, and redistribution. The second and third clusters examined technologies and planning documents as key operational tools of temporal urbanism. Papers in these clusters revealed how data systems, AI, financial modeling, maps, and long-term plans function not merely as technical instruments but as future-making devices that privilege speed, prediction, and control, frequently marginalizing citizens and alternative temporalities from Singapore and Sydney to Bangkok, Xiong’an, and Nusantara. The final cluster shifted its focus to infrastructure and the production of space, highlighting how accelerated construction, exclusionary redevelopment, and megaprojects unevenly materialize futures, while also opening up space for counter-politics and alternative imaginaries. Together, these clusters elaborate a more explicit and systematic engagement with time as a central dimension of capitalist urbanization, particularly how speed, anticipation, and turnover shape both the production of urban space and the politics of whose futures are realized or foreclosed. Finallt, with the excellent ideas, discussions, and distinguished urban scholars gathered at this symposium, we followed up promptly and proposed special issues to journals of urban studies that align with our futuring themes.
The final programme from last year can be seen here, https://ari.nus.edu.sg/events/cities-as-sites/
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