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Paper short abstract:

The proposed paper seeks to place depictions of sustainable urban futures in comparative dialogue. Such an effort is of interest to both identify the universality of such narrative imaginaries and to theorize the logics of urban governance and neoliberal experimentation these visions facilitate.

Paper long abstract:

Scholarship on urban planning and development in Africa has focused increased attention on the arrival of so-called smart, hi-tech, and / or sustainable cities across the continent (see, Watson 2014). Across Africa, these visions have emerged in response to the UN’s 2030 goals, as well as in anticipation of looming crises wrought by climate change, environmental precarity, and socio-economic inequality (among many others). Similar motivations drive the reimagining of Detroit following the bankruptcy years of a decade ago and its supposedly upward trajectory as America’s newest “comeback” city. Taking the aforementioned urban imaginaries as a point of departure, the proposed paper seeks to place these diverse depictions of urban futures in comparative dialogue. Such an effort is of interest in part to identify the universality of such narrative imaginaries across space and time, but also to theorize the logics of urban governance and neoliberal experimentation that these visions facilitate, legitimate, and normalize. To accomplish these tasks, the paper draws on literature from political and urban theory, utopian studies, popular culture, and urban planning, as well as fieldwork and archival research conducted in Detroit in 2018 and 2022.