Prefigurative planning: performing concrete utopias in the here and now

Abstract

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Prefigurative planning
• concrete utopia
• hope
• not-yet
• care

Introduction

Hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see […] other ways of being and even imagine some real grounds for hope (Le Guin 2014, np).

Nearly a decade after this advocacy by Ursula Le Guin, a renown speculative fiction writer, hard times are getting harder in the face of climate breakdown, growing inequalities, widespread mistrust of democratic institutions, and declining public services. These interrelated predicaments have created a sense of the loss of the future in many parts of the world, as various statistics can only give the barest of indication.

An OECD (2021) survey shows that 63% of young people are anxious about their social and economic well-being and 61% feel unable to find or maintain adequate housing. Drawing on European Social Surveys, Reeskens and Vandecasteele (2017) suggest that, since the 2008 financial crisis, young people have become more pessimistic about their health and wellbeing prospects. This ‘loss of the future’ is more explicitly reflected in British surveys. After the 2008 crisis only 12% of people thought their children would have a worse quality of life than their parents. This has now risen to 41% (The Economist 2022a, 26). While in 2007, 53% of people considered their lives were improving, in 2022 only 28% felt so (The Economist 2022b, 30).

Having faith in government dropped from 48% in 2010 to only 35% in 2022 in Britain (Ibid). In Europe, it declined from 40% in 2007 to 30% in 2013 (Hobolt 2014, 56). Across the OECD countries, ‘four out of ten of young people’ believe that ‘the government does not incorporate their views when designing or reforming public benefits and services’ (OECD 2021, 7). Contrary to their expectation that governments should do more, there has been a rolling out of ‘far-reaching fiscal consolidation […], significant welfare retrenchment’, and ‘general austerity programmes’ across Europe (ESS 2018, 3).

Planning systems have not been immune either. In England, planning has been subject to not only debilitating cuts to its financial and human resources, but also demoralizing attacks on its utility, validity and legitimacy. Decades of legislative, institutional, cultural and educational reforms have stripped planning from its creative potentials. It ‘has become unpopular, disconnected from the public and increasingly beholden to the developer rather than the people it is meant to serve’ (quoted in Campbell 2014); an antithesis to Louis Albrechts’s (1991, 126) call for a paradigm shift ‘from planning for capital’ to ‘planning for society’. Although the pace and form of these changes vary in different places, the overall trends are widespread. Much has been written about the underlying neoliberal rationalities of these changes and their regressive social, ecological and political consequences (Tasan-Kok and Baeten 2012; Davoudi 2017). Perhaps their most distressing outcome is the sclerosis of imagination; a malaise diagnosed by David Harvey (1993, 18) in the same year when European Planning Studies was first published:

Unfortunately, the sclerosis apparent in our cities also reigns in our heads. No one believes any more that we can build that city on a hill, that gleaming edifice that has fascinated every Utopian thinker since Plato and St Augustine. Utopian visions have too often turned sour for that sort of thinking to go far. Gloom and pessimism are more common. Is […] (that) the only future we can envisage?

Others have warned about the colonization of planning by a ‘creeping pessimism’ and an ‘absence of hope for the future’ (Bletter 1993, 47). There seems to be a reluctance to imagine places that do not yet exist, and to explore and advocate social and spatial transformations towards better urban futures. The disastrous consequences of modernist urban planning along with utopia's one literal meaning as ‘no-place’ appears to have assigned utopian thinking to the dustbin of planning ideas and discourses (Pinder 2022). However, while modernist utopianism has lost its appeal, ‘the Utopian impulse’ has remained ‘an irrepressible part of human spirit’ (Sandercock 1998, 1). Amid the uncertainties and despairs, this utopian impulse, as a key function of hope, helps 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. Such a capability is a vital driving force for prefigurative planning as a collective process of performing the future in the present.

In what follows, I sketch out the conceptual framework of prefigurative planning by focusing on the interrelated concepts of prefiguration, the not-yet, hope, and concrete utopia. Based on this, admittedly abstract, framework, I suggest that prefigurative planning is a collective pursuit of: negating the given, envisioning concrete utopias, and performing the not-yet future in the present. I also suggest that, the space–time of prefigurative planning is ‘here and now’ with relations of (un)care cutting across its contents, processes and reflections. That, its politics plays out in the interstices of everyday spatial practices and combines reason with intuition and emotion. Throughout, I stress that prefigurative planning is not about how to ‘build that city on the hill’, but how not to give up the pursuit of a plural ‘better cities’ with planning imagination.

Prefiguration

Prefiguration has a long history in social movement scholarship and activism. The use of the term can be traced back to anarchist writings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Springer 2014) and the New Left of the 1960s / 1970s (Breines 1982) including Gramsci’s (1971) critique of the classical Marxist's abstract principles and its focus on the structural determinants of change. In discussing how signs of radical change are prefigured in the present, Gramsci shifted the attention towards civil society's capacity and everyday struggles to build the new in the shell of the old without limiting the new to the boundaries of the old (Ince 2012). For Carl Boggs (1977, 2), prefigurative politics is ‘the embodiment, within the ongoing political practice of a movement, of those forms of social relations, decision-making, culture and human experience that are the ultimate goal’. This is not simply about Gandhi's frequently cited injunction: ‘be the change that you want to see’, or ‘practice what you preach’. Rather, it is about ‘reformulation of the means-ends distinction’ (Van de Sande 2013, 233) whereby one mirrors the other (Swain 2019). As I discuss later, this focus on the journey instead of the destination also distinguishes the utopianism of modernist planning from that of prefigurative planning.

Prefigurative politics ‘refers to a range of social experiments that critique the status quo’ (Cornish et al. 2016, 114) while at the same time pursuing future ‘alternative or utopic social relations in the present’ (Yates 2015, 1). Since the post-2008 social movements, such as Occupy (Gordon 2018), it has gained a growing currency in a wide range of literature from politics to psychology. In planning scholarship, however, the concept has remained underdeveloped. This is intriguing given the close affinity between prefiguration and the future-oriented nature of planning. To close this gap, we need to critically engage with the concept and explore its potentials for future directions of planning theory, practice and education. With this paper, I am inviting planning scholars and practitioners to a dialogue by putting forward a framework for a prefigurative mode of planning that constitutes both the negation of the given and the creation of alternatives.

Negating the given

Margaret Thatcher, the former British Prime Minister, summed up the hegemonic meta-narratives of our time by claiming that ‘there is no alternative’ to the neoliberalised capitalist order, and ‘there is no such thing as a society’ in the individualized social relations. Much of the so called ‘realities’ of our time are built on the taken-for-granted assumptions that, the relentless pursuit of capitalist growth is the source of all good and market transactions can solve all social and ecological problems. That, profit-maximizing growth lifts everyone up and trickle-down economics create levelled-up geographies. That, hedonistic consumption generates happiness and well-being. That, the only true measure of progress is the GDP. That, cities as ‘growth machines’ are better off if they roll out financialised real estate development and become safe-deposit-boxes for ‘anonymous, illicit money’ (Fernandez et al, 2016:2457). And that, public interest is served not by safeguarding social and environmental values, but by boosting private, speculative urban development. In the face of these entrenched assumptions, any dissenting voices are ‘deemed to be the act of lunatics, idealists and revolutionaries’ (Jackson 2009, 14) and any progressive planning activity is undermined as being a barrier to enterprise.

The hold of these fabricated ‘realities’ upon our imagination has been reinforced by a misguided, Foucauldian-inspired argument that all forms of independent action risk being co-opted and appropriated into neoliberal agendas through a complex and pervasive ‘system of micro-power’ (Foucault 2007) which leaves little room for effective ‘counter-conducts’. That, it is impossible to change anything without changing the capitalist order. That, planning has become so entangled with this order that it is not capable of alternative actions. While not underestimating the power of structural forces and neoliberal techniques of governmentality, I would argue that succumbing to pessimisms risks engendering hopelessness, paralyzing actions, and evoking intellectual resignation. It blinds us to the existence of ‘the cracks in the system’ (Holloway 2010). Resisting resignation is at the heart of prefigurative planning which is founded on post-foundational political theories (Marchart 2007). Rooted in Heidegger's philosophy, one of their key tenets is that, ‘society does not have, cannot have, and will never have a fixed, solid, and ultimate foundation or grounding’ (Fearn and Davoudi 2022, 351). The ‘sheer contingency of any social order’ (Rancière,1999, 16) opens up possibilities for prefiguring counter-hegemonic alternatives. Its fleeting and temporary nature produces opportunities for stopping domination from becoming a faith accompli (Scott 1990).

Exploring these openings requires a ‘decolonization of the imaginary’ (Latouche 2009, 95). Negation of the given and ‘disagreement’ (Rancière 1999) with how things are made produce spaces for re-imagining how they might be unmade. Negation rejects the positivist ‘demarcation of what is real and what is not, what exists and what does not’ (Dinerstein 2015, 62). For Ernst Bloch, whose conceptualization of hope is central to the understanding of prefigurative planning, ‘the Real is process’. It is the mediation ‘between present, unfinished past, and above all: possible future’ (Bloch 1986 [1957], 196). The real always encapsulates within it the not yet. ‘The not yet that inhabits the real is not unreal but unrealised (Dinerstein 2015, 62 original emphasis). Negation exposes the ‘ossified concept of reality’ that seeks to foreclose the possibility of alternatives and deny the ontology of ‘Not-Yet’ (Bloch 1986, 196).

As a key constituent of prefigurative planning, negation renders visible that which has been made invisible by techno-rationalist planning to legitimise its ‘parameters of legibility’ (Vazquez 2011, 28). Denouncing these parameters demands critically engaging with the everyday politics of calculative and objectivized reality-fixing practices in planning. For planning scholarship this means radical critiques of the given, communicated through multiple media, beyond the academic press. For planning practice, it means the refutation of calculative practices, such as those used to account for housing land supply. Calculative practices ‘do not merely record a reality independent of themselves; they contribute powerfully to shaping, simply by measuring it, the reality that they measure’ (Callon 1998: 23). In the case of housing, they have turned planning into ‘the supply-side of land financialisation’ (Bradley 2021, 389) in many parts of the world (see examples in Aalbers 2016).

Envisioning concrete utopia

To measure the life ‘as it is’ by a life as it ‘should be’ […] is a defining, constitutive feature of humanity (Bauman 2003, 11).

Prefigurative planning is as much about envisioning alternatives as it is about rejecting the status quo. In the wider context of social transformation, Santos (2004) suggests that we need both a ‘sociology of absences’ and a ‘sociology of emergences’. The former makes visible that which is ‘actively produced as non-existent [..] as a non-credible alternative to what exists’ (Santos 2004, 293). The latter helps to ‘identify and enlarge the signs of possible future experiences, under the guise of tendencies and latencies, that are actively ignored by hegemonic rationality and knowledge’ (Santos 2004, 241). In other words, the latter helps us to explore and identify ‘the conditions of the possibility of hope’ (Santos 2004, 241), and how those condition might be realized. Paraphrasing Levitas (2013), a focus on emergences enables a return to planning's crucial role in creation of utopia; a role that was supressed in order for it to become a reputable social science (Davoudi and Pendlebury 2010).

Exploring the not-yet possibilities invokes hope. But, this is not abstract and fanciful hope; it is radical and transformative hope. It is based not on wishful thinking, but on wilful action that arises from informed discontent with the present and invokes our ‘anticipatory consciousness’ (Bloch 1986, 18). As ‘a praxis-oriented category’ (Levitas 1990a, 18), it urges us to step out of the present, ‘rather than remain hopeful in it’ (Wrangel 2014, 194, original emphasis). It is this ‘concretely genuine hope’ that underpins Bloch’s (1986, 56) philosophy of ‘concert utopia’. Here, ‘utopia is […] no longer ‘nowhere’, as an Other to real history. It is a constituent element of all human activity’ (Bronner 1997, 166).

I will return to this, but first we need to remind ourselves that utopian thinking is not new to planning. On the contrary, envisioning better places runs through its history, motivating its early twentieth century projects such as Garden City movements. For Ebenezer Howard, a garden city was, above all, a ‘Social City’; a cooperative, commonwealth alternative to the capitalist cities of the time. Much of the early modernist urban planning was also in pursuit of creating utopia. The influential ‘functional city’ of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) aspired to be ‘a city of salvation’ (Dear 1995, 33) in which ‘the disposition of the land […] will satisfy the needs of the many as well as those of the individual’ (CIAM 1933). However, the utopia of modernist planning was an ideal end-state, designed and executed from the top down, by an ‘elitist and alienating’ agenda (Ley and Mills 1993, 268). Much of it was inspired by Le Corbusier's model of scrapping the old, unplanned, irrational city, and building on a blank canvas according to a rigid blueprint drawn by perceived all-knowing expert planners (Davoudi and Madanipour 2012). As Bauman (2003, 15) put it, the modernist utopia ‘is a vision of predesigned world, a world in which prediction and planning stave off the play of chance’.

We know too well, not least from Jane Jacobs (1961) powerful critique, that the unifying prescriptions of grandiose modernist utopianism led to the death of great American cities and left a trail of ‘great planning disasters’ (Hall 1980) in towns and cities elsewhere. It is, therefore, not surprising that by the 1990s critics proclaimed ‘The End of Utopia’ (Bann 1993) and the ‘death of urban visions’ (Gold 1985). That, ‘the idea that history contains possibility of freedom […] hardly tapped […] is stone dead’ (Jacoby 1999). Imagining how we might be otherwise has since become a more cynical endeavour than accepting the normalized status quo. Planning is now more at ease with accommodating the ‘normalized “today”’ rather than pursuing ‘the transformation of reality’ (Freire 2005 [1970], 92).

From the ashes of modernist planning, which became subject to a growing critique by feminist, radical and indigenous planners and activists, rose different forms of anti-utopian postmodernism. While these rightly advocate a more ‘incremental movement rather than cataclysmic changes’ (Goldberger 1977, 257) that are akin to prefigurative panning, some are rooted in a ‘complacent brand of new ‘realism’’ (Pinder 2022, 235) which turns away from the negation of the present and utopic visions. The consequences of such ‘realism’ are highlighted by Boyer (1994, 476):

If the spectator is mired in realistic narrations and offered no utopic visions, what will produce a disposition for social change […] What moral authority can be drawn on to challenge the private claims that have distorted the public sphere?

Furthermore, a distressing irony is that the collapse of modernist utopianism has not stopped the rise of ‘multiple degenerate utopias that now surround us’ (Harvey 2000, 168). These segregated, commercialized spaces of gated communities, techno-topias and eco-topias ‘instantiate rather than critique the idea that ‘there is no alternative’’ (Harvey, 2000, 168). It appears that the vacuum created by the decline of progressive urban imagination has been occupied by ‘utopic degeneration’ (Marin 1990 [1972]).

Performing the not-yet

Advocating prefigurative planning is a call for the revival of a ‘philosophy of the possible’ in planning (Lefebvre 1995, 348, original emphasis) and a reconceptualization of utopia on the basis of the Blochian ‘ontology of not-yet’. Instead of being ‘fantastic and compensatory’, his ‘concrete utopia’ is ‘anticipatory’ (Levitas 1990b, 15). It encourages the critique of the present alongside the engagement with the prospects of future transformation whose exact forms are not known a priori. Thus, unlike the pre-determined and fixed utopia of modernist planning, the utopia of prefigurative planning is in the becoming (Sandercock 1998). Harvey (2000, 187) calls it ‘a dialectical utopianism which is rooted in our present possibilities at the same time as it points towards different trajectories’.

It is an ongoing relational process that involves ‘no transcendence’ and no blueprint. It is ‘a collective act of venturing beyond here and now’ (Dinerstein 2015, 65) rather than promising actions in a perpetually postponed future when the conditions are right. At this point, it is useful to draw a distinction between a concrete utopia that is constitutive of prefigurative planning, and Olin Wright’s (2010) notion of ‘real utopia’. While the ‘real’ for him is synonymous with ‘viability’ and ‘achievability’, the ‘concrete’ in Bloch's philosophy is the antonymous of abstract and idealistic. An anticipated utopia is not necessarily an institutionalized one, and ‘real possibility’ does not mean ‘objective or viable’ possibility, as Dinerstein (2015, 68) makes it clear:

While real utopia operates within the given reality but aims to transform it, concrete utopia radically challenges the demarcation of the given reality and operates within the space that is not yet, with no expectations or having decided a priori the principles that would guide it.

This raises an anathema for planning and its preoccupation with formulating long term strategies to guide short term actions. But, as complexity theory and resilience thinking have shown, in a world defined by radical uncertainty of the ‘unknown unkowns’, long range strategic plans either fail to fulfil their ‘elusive promises’ (Abram and Weszkalnys 2013) or perpetuate the status quo by projecting the present into the future. In addition to these shortcomings, a sharp separation between strategy and action loses its meaning in prefigurative planning because prefiguration itself ‘is an effective strategy that is fluid in nature’ (Dinerstein 2015, 17). The utopias of prefigurative planning are praxis-oriented and take shape through experimental projects which begin with rejection of the present, rather than affirmation of a predefined and predetermined future. Highlighting the strategic importance of such experimental actions, Maeckelbergh (2011, 2) suggests that, ‘the goal of pursuing ‘(an)other world(s)’ in an open and explicitly not predetermined way requires practice over time, and that is what makes prefiguration the most strategic approach’.

The here and now

Albert Einstein wrote (in 1955) that, ‘to those of us who believe in physics, this separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, if a stubborn one’ (quoted in Holt n.d.). The same can be said about those of us who believe in planning. Bridging the temporal distinction between the past, the present and the future is a key feature of prefigurative planning. As a collective process of performing the future in the present, its space–time is here and now. But, ‘the now’ is not a fixed point on a linear time beginning from the past and progressing to the future. Such a linearity is disrupted by the ontology of the not-yet in which the future is ‘an unresolved form of the present’ (Dinerstein 2015, 72). Its latent alternatives, though unrealized, inhabit the present. Prefiguration folds the past and the future in the present.

It requires planning imagination and a shift from techno-rational view of the world to relational ways of knowing and doing (Davoudi 2015). It also requires engaging with affective politics that brings together reason, intuition, emotion, inspiration and, above all, imagination. Prefigurative planning involves learning as well as inspiring, humility as well as courage, and deep listening as well as intentionality. Its focus is not always on problem-solving, but on what Paulo Freire (2005 [1970]) calls ‘problem-posing’ by which he means seeing ‘the world not as a static reality but as a reality in the process of transformation’. These practices are by no means value-neutral or apolitical. As suggested below, relations of (un)care cut across prefigurative planning's contents, processes and reflections while its politics plays out in the everyday spatial practices.

The relations of (un)care

Performing the future in the here and now involves relations of care. As Santos (2004, 242) put it, ‘the sociology of emergences replaces the idea of determination by the idea of care’. Framed ontologically, (un)care arises from the interdependencies between humans and non-humans which Jean-Luc Nancy calls ‘being-in-common’; i.e. ‘being with’ those with whom we share space and time (quoted in Popke 2006, 442). Beyond this ontological framing, care is an ethical, political and relational concept (Till 2012; Tronto 1993).

The ethical understanding of care is rooted in moral philosophy and centres on mutual responsibility. As a relational concept, care is ‘constituted in and through the (reciprocal) relation of those who give and receive care’ (Ruddick 1998, 14). As a political concept, care refers to the struggles for recognition of unpaid labour of care (Williams, 2017). Gabauer et al. (2022, 5 original emphasis) sum up these multiple dimensions of care in the context of the city by suggesting that:

care encapsulates what people do (spatial praxis) when they care, how they mutually interact (social relations) when caring, and how and why they tend to reflect on these doings and interactions in a morally informed way (care ethics).

These interlacing, yet space–time specific, relations of (un)care offer new value registers for prefigurative planning as a collective pursuit of the not-yet. They cut across what it does, how it does it, and which principles guide its reflexivity. Navigating these relations of (un)care is closely entwined with the everyday politics of prefigurative planning, to which I turn.

Interstitial politics of everyday

Prefigurative planning is deeply embroiled in the everyday, multifaceted political struggle: over the meanings of utopias and the contents of the not-yet, against co-optation into dominant planning practices, and for moving beyond them. It involves navigating power relations and the tensions and contradictions that arise from unavoidable domineering and reality-fixing attempts both within and beyond a particular experiment. Unlike the command and control approaches of modernist planning, prefigurative planning resists stage-managed closures and operates within the democratic bounds of agonistic pluralism (Mouffe 2005) in which dissenting voices are not muffled by the pressure to achieve consensus. Its plural, contingent and contested visions of the futures are made, not through a politics of plan, but through a politics of engagement in democratically vibrant spaces of agonistic disagreement and dissent (Mouffe 2000).

As a collective act of performing the future in the present, prefigurative planning is shaped by memories of the past, and filtered through planning cultures and place-specific experiences and traditions. These and the grammars of the power relations produce outcomes that are inherently contingent, uncertain and potentially disappointing but, they are never hope-less. As Bloch (1998) insists, ‘Hope is not confidence [..]. If it could not be disappointable, it would not be hope’. Pointing to this paradoxical nature of the Blochian hope, Ritcher (2006, 52) suggests that, ‘the hope that is disappointable is the hope that cannot be fully annihilated’ while ‘hope as confidence or calculating certainty is hope that can’ be defeated.

Concluding remarks

Assuming that we do collectively make our world, that we collectively remake it daily, then why is it that we somehow end up creating a world that few of us particularly like, most find unjust, and over which no one feels they have any ultimate control? (Graeber 2013, 222)

This existential question paraphrases Marx to urge us to think otherwise. My aim in putting forward an alternative mode of planning as prefiguration is to do just that. It is to call for the rejection of the given and the envisioning of alternatives, not by producing plans, but by harnessing planning imaginations; and not by pre-defining a postponed future, but by performing the possibilities of the not-yet in the here and now. This mode of planning is about initiating, forging, enabling and engaging in alternative ways of intervening in space–time from within the conditions of the present but without being limited to them.

Such an endeavour may be particularly timely because crises open a space in which the tensions of ‘‘what has been lost’’ meet the aspirations of ‘‘what can be next’’ (Varvaroussis 2019, 471). They unsettle fabricated realities and inspire people to reflect on what kind of future cities and societies they want to be part of. Amid tragic loss of lives and livelihoods, the Covid-19 pandemic shone a glimmer of ‘hope in the dark’ (Solnit 2004). We saw a flourishing of solidarity and self-organised, spontaneous community actions. Attitudes changed too, pointing to the possibility that things can be unmade. A survey conducted in 2020 in the UK found that more than 8 in 10 people wanted the government to prioritize health and wellbeing over economic growth, and more than 6 in 10 felt that the government should prioritize improved social and environmental outcomes ahead of GDP (The Guardian 2020).

Prefigurative planning can draw inspiration from and build on these civic energies and people's creative impulses which, as Lefebvre insisted, make up the urban life. It can actively engage with myriads of prefigurative actions performed by diverse communities in both Global North and South. While they may not be called as such, examples include: intentional communities, community land trusts, cooperative housing, transition towns, urban commons, and on a smaller scale: community-led food initiatives, pop-up parks, rewilding projects and so on. A common feature of these actions is the disruption of dominant spatial–temporal orders and the invocation of imaginative alternatives. They are ‘transgressive, counter-hegemonic, and imaginative’ (Miraftab 2017, 276). While acknowledging the existence of power-play in self-organization (Boonstra and Rauws 2021), working from the ground up remains a key feature of prefigurative planning. In his discussion of what constitutes a ‘good city’, John Friedmann (2000, 471) argued that the key actor is ‘an autonomous, self-organizing civil society, active in making claims, resisting and struggling on behalf of the good city within a framework of democratic institutions’. Similarly, Davina Cooper’s (2014, 2) case studies show how utopias are performed in the spaces of everyday life, and how disruptive experimentations are mobilized in everyday public spaces. As some of the case studies in Savini, Ferreira, and Carlotta von Schönfeld (2022) show, many planners are already engaged in and / or mobilizing prefigurative actions and transformative interventions which strive ‘to give and find hope through an anticipation of alternative possibilities or potentialities’ (Anderson 2006, 703).

As discussed earlier, prefigurative actions are performed within the existing systems and, hence, require navigating power relations and breaking up, working through and / or bypassing rigid institutional structures. A recent explicit and inspiring example is from the UK health care system. A study by Moskovitz and Garcia-Lorenzo (2016, 196) shows that a group of frontline health care providers are engaged ‘in daily grassroots change activities while having to navigate top-down, planned, organizational change interventions’. Through prefigurative ‘enactment of self-initiated small-scale change’, they have moved beyond the organisational limitations to provide good quality health care. In doing so, they have also mobilized hope and a ‘sense of personal agency and collective efficacy’ in making things unmade. This example is not as alien to planning as it might seem, because despite their differences both health care professionals and planners are perceived to be committed to an ethic of care. For the former, providing high quality care for patients is the single most cherished value underpinning their training, in much the same way as working in the ‘public interest’ is / ought to be in planning education. In addition, both health care providers and planners work in institutionally challenging environments which were established as part of the welfare state and are now facing increasing pressures for privatization and neoliberalisation. So, learning about what prefigurative actions can achieve in one sector offers hope for what might be possible in the other.

As we celebrate the anniversary of the European Planning Studies, we need ‘an optimism of the intellect […] coupled with an optimism of the will’ (Harvey 2000, 17) that foster hope for creating better futures, however defined. Prefigurative planning is a call for this twin optimisms, and for a return to a utopianism that does not ‘settle on utopias […], but instead […] embark on the process of endless questioning’ (Grosz 2001, 150) and performing alternatives in the here and now.

Acknowledgments

I presented some of these ideas in a keynote speech in the 58th World Planning Congress of the International Society of Urban and Regional Planning (ISOCARP) in Brussels, 3–6 October 2022. I am grateful to the organizers and participants for their interests and encouragements. I also owe thanks to the two anonymous reviewers for their useful and constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).