The Future of the Future in Planning: Appropriating Cyberpunk Visions of the City

Abstract

Planning's vision of life in the 21st century tends to be more-of-the-same or the adoption, often implicit, of a market-based information society in which telecommunications advances will restructure time and space in ways that are beneficial in the long run. The future of the future, however, deserves more attention in urban planning. Utopian constructs have largely been abandoned and traditional methods of projection and modeling are poor techniques for anticipating qualitative and nonlinear change. An exploration of cyberpunk writings, a genre of science fiction, offers the opportunity to critically examine and assess the hegemonic model of the information society as well as more dystopian pictures of how evolving social, economic, cultural, and technological patterns could combine in the next century. Attending to the urban dimensions of these fictional works and discourses about them can contribute to more realistic and ethical planning scenarios of the future.