Date 29 April 2025
Location LSK Architecture Building, CUHK
"When there's no future, how can there be sin?" (- Johnny Rotten, The Sex Pistols)
The defiant cry of 1970s British punk embodied the frustration of a working class trapped in a futureless society, disillusioned by both mainstream culture and the utopian dreams of the ’60s counterculture. Yet, ironically, "No Future" became a cultural force, shaping what came next—not through nihilism, but through the rejection of imposed destinies and the search for new possibilities. It revoked different notions of the future and the ethical values entangled with them. How does our current research around the built environment critically consider the speculative future?
Perhaps counter-intuitively, this conference focuses on the dimension of time in disciplines that are primarily concerned with space. Time is widely understood as a linear succession of moments. When facing the past temporal direction, architecture and the built environment stand as testimonies to past future-casting imaginations of urban conditions. Towards the future direction, spatial production involves both speculation, extrapolated causal relationships, and uncertainties. Often, the task of spatial production is to bypass this linear sequence in order to prefigure the future. Most commonly, architectural plans and drawings go beyond the mere record of action and point towards “anticipatory illumination” (Coleman, N., 2018). Are there ways to construct space beyond a linear conception of time?
In Space, Time and Architecture. The Growth of a New Tradition, the architectural historian Sigfried Giedion wrote, “For planning of any sort our knowledge must go beyond the state of affairs that actually prevails. To plan we must know what has gone on in the past and feel what is coming in the future.” (p. 7) This “feel” for the future can vary from a simple hunch to complex data-sets. Both ‘feel(s)’ are dependent on static canonical frameworks of the past. Proposals may question these static notions by opposing canonic historiographies about space, architecture, and dominant forces of urbanization. While Gideon extrapolates on what is already there, Abidin Kusno theorizes the ghost of our future past. “The colonial legacy of divided cities and fragmented planning continues to haunt the postcolonial city” (p. 230). A call to consider how the ghostly ties to the pre-existing power structures that shape our cities today in conversation with forces of globalisation and nationalism. The concept of time, nonetheless, is still widely accepted as a given constant background noise. If multiple histories coexist, why can’t there be more than one future?
Future outlooks may seem grim and uncertain at times. The uneven extraction of material resources, transnational infrastructural visionary projects, and an uncanny sense of having no agency over the future add to a sense of unjust imposition of control over the future elsewhere. How can the spatial disciplines help in the face of this vulnerability towards the future? To what extent can they influence and reshape our understanding of agency in the face of these challenges? In what specific realms can they enact meaningful change?
Contributions from various disciplines may address, but are not limited to the following questions:
1, Spatial Agency: Inequality, Resistance, and the Right to the City
Who decides, who benefits, who gets displaced? Architecture claims to serve society, yet it often reinforces inequality. What is built—or left unbuilt—today shapes future generations yet to be born and becomes the device of future spaces of action. Was the self-organized urban condition of Kowloon Walled City’s demolition progressive or destructive to our future Hong Kong? Gentrification in Berlin and New York displaces communities for a top-down urban improvement. How much power do communities truly have in shaping their environments? Can cooperative housing and community-led planning challenge top-down control, or are they merely symbolic gestures?
2, Technology and Control: Algorithmic Futures and the Limits of Acceleration
Technology is often framed as a force of progress and acceleration, but whose interests does it serve, and which futures does it preemptively shape? AI-driven planning, predictive surveillance, and algorithmic governance claim to optimize urban life, yet they often reinforce existing hierarchies rather than challenge them. Histories of science, algorithmic systems, and information politics reveal that technological developments do not unfold neutrally in space—they accelerate toward specific directions, privileging certain actors while marginalizing others. Does technology democratize urban conditions, or does it impose new spatial dependencies that extend existing forms of control? Arguably, GIS, digital twins, and simulations are not merely neutral planning tools but political projects that seek to preempt and manipulate the future. If technology increasingly anticipates and structures the spaces we inhabit, how can we contest futures that have already been encoded?
3, Ethics of Anticipation: Between Loss, Resilience and Justice
How does anticipation shape landscapes of heritage? Although predictable, culturally valued sites like Venice are increasingly at risk. While the mastery of landscape manipulation becomes more refined, wildfires, floods, and droughts are escalating beyond control. Care, repair, and maintenance are gaining new attention in academia, yet climate damage and injustice continue to affect generations to come. The loss of heritage takes different forms—through slow decay and erosion, or through rapid replacement and transformation in fast-developing urban centers. Does accelerated urban progress unavoidably come at the cost of heritage and justice? In this light, is anticipation a tool for emancipation, or is it an instrument of stasis?
