Urban Future Projections

Ethnographic Encounters with Temporalities and Practices

Abstract

This article examines how urban futures are practically produced within long-term development projects, treating “the future” not as a distant time horizon but as an interactive, practical, and socially produced imaginarium. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and audiovisual recordings from an interdisciplinary research-and-planning project in southern Germany, the article conceptualizes projections as a distinct modality of future-oriented practice through which uncertainty and temporality are organized. Building on Barry and Gambino’s (2024) notion of “projects of transition,” phenomenological accounts of anticipation, and an ethnomethodological focus on interaction, it illustrates three arenas in which projecting becomes observable. In planning meetings, projections emerge through subjunctive formulations, categorizations, and procedural clarification that translate uncertainty into actionable “next steps” while keeping options open. In participatory on-site events, projections must be publicly demonstrable and therefore become fragile, relying on deictic and embodied alignments of maps, gestures, and material features that are repeatedly contested and repaired. A third mode appears when ethnographic observations are reflexively taken up in institutional communication and reformulated into persuasive imaginaries, positioning the researcher as a “reflexivity authority” with both risks of selective repurposing and potential for making attachments and temporal orientations accountable. Ethnography is presented both as an analytic method for tracing these interactional accomplishments and as a participant in the fabrication of urban futures. Overall, the article offers a perspective on how futures are sequentially imagined, contested, stabilized, reformulated, and implemented through situated practices that make them projectable.