Imagine

On speculation: landscape, city-making and imagination

- Christopher Marcinkoski

In order to generate completely new ideas about the future city, concepts of financial and design speculation must be integrated with a third variable: landscape

When confronted with the challenge of thinking about the future of cities — both extant and those yet to be — every few years seemingly brings a new set of essential urgencies that supposedly changes how designers think about urban space. Before there were calls for equity-based design, there was resilience. Before resilience, walkability. Before walkability, sustainability. Before sustainability, globalisation. Before globalisation, the post-industrial. And so on, and so on. Yet, despite these changing exigencies, there is one much less-discussed, but no less essential motivation that has fundamentally been at the very centre of city-making activities since at least the time of ancient Rome, if not before — speculation.

Within this discussion, the term speculation has two relevant histories. For the general public, speculation is often viewed in the pejorative — relating to a form of extraction oriented principally towards financial motivations, as opposed to social or cultural impetuses. Here I am referring to the speculative activities tied to financial markets that are understood by many economists as an inevitable characteristic of a modern capitalist economic system.1

In the context of the question of the future city, our interest is specifically in the physical instruments of settlement — land, agricultural products, mobility infrastructures, buildings and, most recently, entire cities — upon which numerous speculative endeavours have been based.

These activities have become so commonplace that the general public seemingly fails to notice their appearance — except perhaps on the occasion of a catastrophic politico-economic disruption that results from their pursuit.2