City Shock: Planning the Unexpected

In a world of seemingly ever-increasing instability, many urban planning decisions seem to be governed not by vision, but by fear--fear of disaster, of change, of the unknown. What can we learn from this state of affairs? Can such fear be made beneficial? Is it conceivable that ‘fear’ might even offer a kind of guide in matters of urban planning? Guided by fantasy and invention rather than science, City Shock: Planning the Unexpected proposes ten ‘what if’ scenarios, imagining how each of these scenarios could play out in the Dutch landscape between 2018 and 2047. In a narrative composed of feasible but unlikely headlines, a series of newspaper-style spreads report on fictitious future catastrophic events, exposing possible causes and consequences. City Shock is the sixth book in Winy Maas’ Why Factory’s Future Cities series.