Think Far Futures, Act Now: Reclaiming Distant Futures in Planning Education and Practice

This chapter explores the radical potential of conceptualising planning as a uniquely, primarily, and essentially temporal field, in addition to its spatial dimension. I make the case for planning education and practice to strategically embrace multiple timeframes, including very long future time horizons, and for planning theory and thought to focus on the many possible ways to decolonise and reclaim the future. This is essential to planning for sustainability of human and non-human life in the Anthropocene. This chapter is informed by my experience with planning education in North America. This chapter reviews selected urban plans envisioning cities and regions on 50-year planning horizons, 500–2000-year-old institutions, and legal cases and ethical principles that ground efforts to plan for innumerable future generations. It also explores good distant futures proposed in political discourse, utopian science fiction, Afrofuturism, and future studies as strategies to (re)open planners’ far future imaginaries. This chapter argues that, in addition to “thinking globally and acting locally,” planning should adopt the motto: think far-futures. Act now.