Prefigurative planning: performing concrete utopias in the here and now

Current crises of climate breakdown, growing inequalities, democratic deficits, and declining public services have created an absence of hope for the future and a creeping pessimism about the ability of planning to be a force for good and to imagine places that do not yet exist. In resisting domination from becoming a fait accompli, this paper revisits the role of the utopian impulse in enabling us to see the existing conditions not as how things are, but as how they are made to be, and how they might be unmade. Drawing on interrelated concepts of prefiguration, the not-yet, hope and concrete utopia, I put forward a prefigurative mode of planning defined as a collective pursuit of, negating the given, envisioning utopias, and performing the not-yet futures in the here and now. I suggest that the politics of prefigurative planning plays out in the interstices of everyday spatial practices and imbues reason with intuition and emotion. That, the relations of (un)care cut across its contents, processes and reflections. Seen in this way, prefigurative planning is not about how to ‘build that city on the hill', but how not to give up the pursuit of ‘better’ cities by combining criticality with planning imagination.