Conflicts in Urban Future-Making: Governance, Institutions, and Transformative Change - Paperback

by Monika Grubbauer (Editor), Alessandra Manganelli (Editor), Louis Volont (Editor)

Under conditions of heightened uncertainty, cities face enormous challenges in responding to contemporary crises. The contributors to this volume explore the conflictual dynamics that arise when urban futures are imagined, negotiated, and materialized. Through the lens of urban future-making, they provide a timely analysis of the conflicts that shape planning projects, architectural interventions, and new experiments in the built environment. Their analyses show how urban future-making is conditioned by conflicting governance arrangements, actor constellations, and power dynamics - offering rich insight into the critical role of professionals as key agents of urban transformation.

Author Biography

Monika Grubbauer is a professor in history and theory of the city at HafenCity Universität Hamburg. She teaches historical and theoretical foundations in urban planning and urban design and is the spokesperson of the DFGfunded research training group Urban FutureMaking, established in 2022 and jointly organized by the three Hamburg universities. Her research focuses on urban development politics, housing and urban policy, and knowledge practices in architecture and planning. Alessandra Manganelli is an urban studies scholar working on socioecological transformations in contemporary cities. Her doctoral research (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and Toronto Metropolitan University) has focused on the hybrid governance of urban food movements in Europe and North America. As a postdoctoral researcher at HafenCity Universität Hamburg, her research deals with urban experimentation, urban environmental governance, and socioecological justice. Louis Volont explores the modern metropolis through a culturalsociological lens and is a postdoctoral researcher in sociology at the HafenCity Universität Hamburg. He was previously a Fulbright Fellow at the MIT program in Art, Culture, and Technology (ACT), where he collaborated on the Choreographing the City project. His work looks at the cultural, temporal, and moral dimensions of urban life.