On Time and Planning: Opening Futures by Cultivating a “Sense of Now”

Modern Clock Time (Is It Cuckoo?)

Sociological theory and research has long recognized how treatments of time and understandings of self, social origins, and norms co-emerge within every culture (Adam and Groves 2011). Tracking time through calendars has long allowed premodern societies to make the future predictable, to anticipate and plan, especially in agriculture, and this turned time knowledge and associated predictive abilities into a means to control the future and thus the present. In other words, knowledge of time is power. ³ The historical emergence of what is known as “modern time” can be traced to ruptures in dominant understandings, resulting from changing economic, political, and social realities in the mid-eighteenth century, with the enlightenment challenge, to God’s eternal time in Europe and the subsequent opening of the future. This is neatly symbolized by the new meaning of the word “revolution” in France, from a cyclical motion to a moment of radical break in a linear conception of time (Koselleck 2004). The inauguration of modern time is founded on a new understanding of the future as open and malleable. Knowledge of the past can no longer serve as an adequate guide to what is to come. Crucially, an open future is also a future that can be purposively shaped. A growing awareness of the freedom this creates is a defining feature of enlightenment thought.

For example, this is reflected in Simmel’s classic sociological view of society as a becoming (sociation) and in Mead’s continuously emergent, evolutionary, open-ended but steerable “great adventure of human life” where “human beings with their reflexive intelligence can shape (their) evolutionary future” (Strauss 1991, 416). Mead’s evolutionary future opens the possibility of applying reason and knowledge to propose “an order which is more adequate than the order which has been there” (Mead 1938, 663)—that is to plan. He also proposes that this evolution can enlarge “the scope of moral social consciousness (…) expanding universes of discourse” and increase “social differentiation, complexity and integration” (Strauss 1991, 418). The inauguration of modern time thus created the conditions of possibility for planning: a means of applying reason to shape an open future (Connell 2009).

Modern time is lived by the clock which powerfully conditions our commonsense understanding of time. Abstract clock time is disconnected from natural cycles or human biology and has become essential for fine-grained social coordination and the standardization of activities across space. The power of clock time obscures the extent to which it is a social construction:

…clocks not only include time as a measure, they also measure time. It is this dual function of clock time that requires some attention since the two are qualitatively different. The invariant measure is a human abstraction whilst that which is being measured is a physical, natural phenomenon whose very essence is repetition with variation. (Adam 1990, 53)

In Technics and Civilization, Mumford ([1934] 2010) sized the essential contribution of the clock to Western culture and industrialization. The punch clock transformed time into an instrument of class domination over production and social behaviors. Deeper still, the clock became a “second nature,” with a:

pervasive and strict (effect): it presides over the day from the hour of rising to the hour of rest. (…) Abstract time became the new medium of existence. Organic functions…regulated by it: one ate not upon feeling hungry but when prompted by the clock; one slept not when one was tired but when the clock sanctioned it. A generalized time-consciousness accompanied the wider use of clocks—dissociating time from organic sequences. (Mumford [1934] 2010, 17)

Within the industrial and postindustrial age, imposed times (work/school schedules, curfews) are simultaneously central to economic and social production and techniques of domination. Sociologists have long noted how time disciplines social life. Temporal habitus (or norms) are fully internalized forms of self-restraint that are both pervasive and implacable (Tabboni 2001). Elias (1992) went as far as to argue that the level of “civilization” (a term consistent with Mead’s notion of social evolution) reflects the extent to which social actors are able and willing to acculturate and submit to an imposed, although invisible, time discipline. Rejecting clock time thus becomes a potentially revolutionary act: “Refusing to carry a watch…is one of the ways of declaring independence from conventional society” (Lynch 1972, 66).

Clock time not only structures human experience, it also renders the future abstract, empty and ready to be exploited—especially when accounting for time means that future values are discounted to the benefit of net present values (Adam and Groves 2011; Adam 2006). When time can be sold and traded, it generates both relations of indebtedness and the potential for investment decisions calculated on anticipated rates of return. The abstraction of clock time also underpins the idea of planning in largely unquestioned ways, where an open future is waiting to be “colonized” and can be to some extent known and controlled. While plans may acknowledge the need to “phase” development, review, or update proposals amid the uncertainties affecting implementation, they typically remain premised on defining a desirable end state and the mechanisms by which it might be reached. Time is therefore viewed as largely open and empty, little more than a measure of spatial change marking the realization or disruption of spatial ordering.

“Live from Postmodernity!” Living in Real Time

Modern time is homogeneous and linear, and modernity increased speed in information and communication dramatically, compressing time and duration, thus extending and globalizing the present—to the detriment of the past and future (Adam 2006). The further intensification of the speed of flows, or space–time compression (Harvey 1990), is a fundamental feature of postmodernity with profound consequences for understanding human capacities to purposively plan for the future. Postmodernity is sometimes characterized as a collapsing of the time–space continuum. Postmodern time is defined by immediacy and simultaneity, when time becomes, paradoxically ubiquitous and yet less relevant. Just as places become placeless, everywhere identical, time has become featureless, every time a simultaneous “now.” This is linked to the advent of immediacy in communication that eradicates both time and distance.

The modern world abridges all historical times as readily as it reduces space. Everywhere and every age have become here and now. History has been abolished by our new media. (McLuhan and Zingrone 1995, 304)

Independent of the risks inherent to smart cities development, increasingly accurate clock time enables the precise synchronization of activities in fast-paced service-oriented economies (e.g., “just-in-time” supply chains). Social acceleration is driven by technologically enabled economic change and the increasing functional specialization of society (Rosa 2009). These increase the pace of life and social change, generating the pervasive experience of stressful time shortages or “time famines” (Linder 1970)—there are “not enough hours in the day.” While hard to gauge, Lübbe (2009) suggests this can be measured by the extent to which the past no longer holds true in the present or acts as a guide to the future. In these circumstances, the present becomes “contracted” and the horizon of experience (past) and expectation (future) no longer coincide sufficiently for people to make plans:

…adherence to a time-resistant life plan [is] incompatible with the demands of the late modern world. Thus, a conception of the good life based on long-term commitments, duration, and stability is thwarted by the fast pace of social change. (Rosa 2009, 100)

Acceleration dynamics have changed the key phenomenological categories of past, present, and future in ways that continue to be debated. The future no longer operates as an “open horizon of expectation” into which problems, hopes, and possibilities can be deferred. Instead, according to Nowotny (1996, 50), the unravelling of enlightenment faith in progress has created an “extended present” with little prospect of escape from unsustainable trajectories:

Thus it is not just that (the) “future is not what it used to be”…. It is increasingly overshadowed by the problems that are opening up in the present. The future no longer offers that projection space into which all desires, hopes and fears could be projected without many inhibitions because it seemed sufficiently remote to be able to absorb everything which had no place or was not welcome in the present. The future has become more realistic (…). But this also means that it is drawing closer to the present. (…) a momentum of the present has been established which has to concentrate on itself.

The contemporary relation to time also creates experiences of rupture and loss. Guyer (2007) suggests the near future, previously a horizon of possibility toward which individuals and societies could act, has largely disappeared, replaced by long-term promises of the future prosperity that free markets or evangelistic religion offer to the faithful. For others, the end of history, neoliberal hegemony, and the absence of alternatives to capitalism have hollowed out not just the midrange future but also the longer-term utopian horizon necessary to motivate belief in a better future (Harvey 2000; Friedmann 2000).

With different emphases, these accounts engage with concerns that technological, societal, and environmental changes, interacting with the neoliberal focus on free markets as the way to determine the future, have reworked time, undermining the scope for purposively shaping futures. Rosa (2003) further suggests that social acceleration fundamentally challenges the possibility of democratic governance since many social transformations now happen so quickly as to defy the ponderous processes required to govern change (democracy takes time). In Luhmann’s (1976) terms, economic and technological change are creating “future presents” at a rate that surpasses societal capacity to deliberate about “present futures” or switch trajectories toward the realization of desirable alternatives.

Contemporary sociological work, drawing on theoretical frameworks focused on complexity, frequently conceptualizes futures as emergent products of complex sociotechnical systems that are powerfully path dependent, generating lock-in effects that are hard to reshape (Urry 2016). Presenting change as a product of systemic processes that seem to defy ready steering does not offer much hope for responding to the urgent need for transformation to avoid impending ecological crises. Paradoxically, then, at a time when climate change and associated fears speak to an unprecedented need to plan for a radically different future, there is limited faith that it is possible or desirable to do so on the scale required to transform society. The weak contemporary status of ideas of planning (e.g., Gunder 2016) and their association with anachronistic, governmental practices must therefore be critically assessed in relation to changing ideas of time, with a view to somehow separating political and ideological influences from underlying social changes that potentially challenge the possibility of planning.

Before turning our attention more fully to planning’s engagement with time, we set out to explore a variety of perspectives that have the potential to generate new insights into the relationship between planning and time.

The (Post-)Modern Time Horizons of Planning Theory

In 1993, Friedmann (1993) wrote that planning’s traditional “Euclidean” model of time–space geometry had become an anachronism:

The engineering model of planning (…), with its penchant for advance decision making and blueprinting and its claims of superiority to other forms of decision making because of its scientific character (…) must be abandoned. (p. 482)

Identifying “modern” planning with a discredited faith in scientific methods and misplaced expectations of control over the future aligns with the broad temporal shifts discussed above and with wider postmodern critiques of modernist planning (Beauregard 1989). The postmodern condition reduces trust in the future, progress, and our ability to shape either. Instead, it shifts the sociopolitical focus toward the present. Distrust in future progress also replaces planning’s “grand plans” with incremental risk mitigation, adaptation, and resilience. Planning still seeks to normalize and shape the future to support stability, security, and certainty but that future is increasingly short term (Connell 2009).

Cautious of the limits of prescriptive forecasting and of planning’s capacity to control the future, Friedmann proposed two temporal coordinates for planning: one, a utopian horizon to navigate toward, and the other concerned with immediate, real-time incremental actions in the present (Beauregard 2015). Arguably, these remain the limiting timescales for much of planning theory today. Few would disagree agree with Beauregard (2015) when he argues that planners should cultivate a creative orientation toward the possible rather than resigning themselves to the probable. However, prevailing approaches typically stress the immediate complexity and indeterminacy of the world, the likelihood of unexpected outcomes, and thus the superiority or necessity of incrementalism and pragmatism. Communicative planning theories focused on learning from practice have, for example, illustrated how planners have no choice but to improvise and muddle through (Hoch 1994 , 2016; Connell 2009; Lindblom 1959; Laws and Forester 2015). This promotes a pragmatic focus on deliberation about the here and now as a means of debating change but arguably pays less attention to how the future is represented or to the impact of such representations (Myers 2007).

Alternative theoretical approaches drawing on complexity theory (de Roo 2018), coevolutionary theory (van Assche et al. 2018), and various strands of post-structuralism, including assemblage theory and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (Hillier 2018), have begun to introduce different conceptions of time into planning thought. These share a common concern to leave the future open to processes of becoming or emergence. Like pragmatism, they are skeptical of traditional attempts to “normalize” a future by controlling change. The potential tension between commonsense conceptions of planning as “control” and open-ended ideas of emergence raises questions about contemporary relations to time and the desirability and possibility of planning as a means of envisaging and shaping futures within complex sociomaterial systems.

These accounts of contemporary planning theory’s future orientation do not, however, exhaust the temporal complexities of planning practices that operate within culturally distinctive regulatory regimes which produce their own temporalities and rhythms, typically encompassing multiple relations to past, present, and future (Abram 2014). It is to these that we now turn.

Behind the Times: Planning and the Past

Time is deeply intertwined with history. Humanity lives “historically,” that is, with awareness of the past and of the present’s position relative to the past. According to Nietzsche ([1874] 1980):

The historical and the unhistorical are equally necessary for the health of an individual, a people and a culture. (p. 10)

In addition to anchoring us in the grand flow of history, historic preservation makes the implicit promise that a friendly future will preserve our present. Relations to the past and to a friendly future are important to well-being, quality of life, and property values, for example, in the well-preserved historic centers of Florence, Paris, or San Francisco. However, to the extent that historic preservation seeks to “fix” certain elements of the built environment in time rather than viewing them as dynamic parts of a fluid and ever-changing system, it may also mark a retreat from the complexities of historical change (Tait and While 2009).

Conversely, the logic of development leads planners to ignore, problematize, or write-off aspects of the past considered unworthy of preservation, such as obsolescent “dilapidated,” “insalubrious,” or “dated” structures, demolished to facilitate progress toward the new. Cultural attachments to places and their unique histories and meanings can lead people to mobilize resistance, generating conservative politics against change and its promises of planned progress. Planning’s complicity in processes of creative destruction generates a range of responsibilities toward the past and toward people who find the loss of valued attachments traumatic (e.g., Erfan 2017). This responsibility is rarely acknowledged, except perhaps in belatedly recognizing the historic failings of urban renewal programs (Schweitzer 2015).

If historic preservation has the potential to link the past, present, and possible futures of built environments, planning history plays a similar function in building narratives about the nature of planning as a societal activity. As Sandercock (1998) argues, making visible previously hidden stories that challenge the dominant account of a socially reformist, professional activity populated by white, male heroes and villains has a distinctive political purpose. Reframing histories can lead to the critical reshaping of understandings of contemporary planning and how it should develop in the future.

Now Is the Time for Change: Timing, Urgencies, Delays, and Conflict in the Present

Plans and planning decisions are often criticized for taking too long, for getting their timing wrong. Plans intended to guide developments over a fifteen- to twenty-year period are often out of date before they are implemented, due to delays in their production, political wrangling, or changes in circumstance that undermine their rationales and aspirations.

However, despite concerns that planning for the future has become impossible or unfashionable, plans continue to be made for various timescales, from longer-term strategic visions to shorter-term, detailed master plans for particular sites or neighborhoods (Abram 2014). In response to criticism of inflexible blueprints, planning theory and practice have attempted to imagine more flexible, adaptable, and incremental plans. Contemporary ideas of strategic planning, for example, see plans as part of ongoing deliberative processes intended to influence stakeholder actions toward the realization of a shared vision (e.g., Balducci et al. 2011; Throgmorton, 2003). The persuasive power of such visions to mobilize action across time and space is perhaps less certain (Shipley 2006), and they are often accompanied by shorter-term action plans and monitoring to ensure they are responsive to changing circumstances.

Concerns and complaints about the impact of decision-making delays on development are common, even though “delay” itself is often not clearly defined (Booth 2002). In many Western nations, plan implementation is primarily measured by the speed of development permit processing (e.g., Ball 2011). These concerns are particularly marked in a neoliberal era when state planning processes are seen as imposing unreasonable restrictions on market forces, hindering private development and thus economic prosperity. Attempts to limit regulations and speed up decision-making have been central to neoliberal reform initiatives. The imperative of speed, however, often conflicts with other goals, such as ensuring meaningful public participation which requires sensitivity to the time needed to engage diverse publics (Abram 2014; Weber 2015; Raco, Durrant, and Livingstone 2018).

Marshall, Cowell, and Westley’s (2015) study of the time taken for major infrastructure decision-making in the United Kingdom suggests that widespread concerns about planning delays may be overstated compared to delays due to developer behavior, financing issues, or political influence. This draws attention to the multiple temporalities that need to be coordinated to implement development projects, including bureaucratic and legal processes, electoral terms, political machinations to secure public support, macro- and microeconomic, investment, and redevelopment cycles. Each operates on distinctive rhythms that require synchronization for development to occur. Timing is therefore a crucial and deeply challenging dimension of planning practice. Disjunctions between activities can, and do, generate conflict and delay. Legal and/or processing agreements can thus be used to try to bind actors to an agreed timeline (Lloyd and Peel 2012)—with the risk that those excluded from such agreements (typically wider publics) will contest their terms.

Failures in the timing of planning processes can have profound effects on people and places. “Planning blight” is a consequence of the uncertainty generated by temporal lags between a publicly stated intention to develop and change happening on the ground. In recent years, attention has focused on temporary uses of vacant sites or “pop-ups,” whether as a formal means of dealing with problems of temporal coordination to reanimate underused space, or as an insurgent tactic to reshape development trajectories where the promises of market-led improvement have not materialized (see Henneberry 2017; Mandanipour 2017).

Time and timing are experienced differently by different social actors and powerful social institutions seek to impose temporalities that may jar with the experiences of those affected by change (Livingstone and Matthews and 2017; Wolf and Wouter 2018). In the context of urban regeneration in the United Kingdom, Raco, Henderson, and Bowlby (2008) explore the politics of space–time and show how administrative-bureaucratic time (e.g., phasing, ordering, milestones), political time frames, and developers’ short profit-oriented time frames clash with residents’ expectations about the timing of the delivery of benefits. The politics of redevelopment become conflicts over whose time frames dominate (see also Raco, Durrant, and Livingstone 2018).

On the other hand, time is also used strategically and tactically by a range of actors. The use of pacing and delay by the powerful to wear down resistance is, for example, apparent in opposition to lawsuits launched by workers, residents, and environmentalists seeking redress for environmental harms committed by petrochemical plants in Louisiana:

“They (residents of a heavily contaminated bayou) have been kept waiting for years for word on a lawsuit, a wait that has nearly worn them down and spent their anger” (p 43) “…it is common corporate strategy, with the cooperation of the state agencies, to string these lawsuits out for so long that plaintiffs die before money is due.” (Hochschild 2016, 53–54)

Further, microlevel research is required to explore the complex forms of temporal regulation on which all planning instruments and processes are premised. However, all of these examples point toward distinctive facets of a still rarely considered politics of time that is central to planning, especially when it comes to the pace and timing of development and change. While this politics may be something planning actors are intuitively attuned to, thinking more explicitly about time and temporalities may open up a range of possibilities for thinking and acting differently.

Only Time Will Tell: Planning and the Future

If the “plan operates as a temporal hinge from a secure past to loss in the present and from a known future to an unknown future” (Abram 2014, 140), the future can be understood as that which is “not-yet” (Adam 2006). Planning, investment, and development are future oriented insofar as they seek to normalize the future, reducing risk and uncertainty (Connell 2009). Paradoxically, this often involves systematically discounting the future. This discounting is explicit in cost–benefit analyses but also implicit in legal frameworks that hold us responsible for past actions but not for the future consequences of present decisions. As a result, the “commodified empty future” is exploited in the interest of the present (Adam and Groves 2011, 18).

Industrial extension into the future is characterized by parasitical borrowing from the future, by prospecting and plundering it for use and benefit in the present without regard for time–space distantiated effects… (Adam 2006, 125)

Significantly, the planning literature on futures rarely recognizes that engaging people with the future poses particular challenges in societies where the “capacity to aspire” is not universal or evenly distributed (Appadurai 2013). Individuals and communities have different orientations toward the future and the possibility of planning. Planning also largely fails to engage with the complex psychosocial or affective dimensions of engaging with the future, which often involves collective negotiation of the past in order to build understanding and hope in the present (Baum 1997; Erfan 2017).

Futures studies, emerging from corporate and governmental exercises in foresight, emphasize that the future is socially constructed and that exploring possible, probable, and preferred futures facilitates anticipatory action (Bell 1997). This has led to the development of a variety of tools that can engage planning practice more fully with the future, including scenarios, visioning, and backcasting. However, links between the two fields remain underdeveloped (Myers and Kitsuse 2000; Connell 2009; Freestone 2012). Other ways of exploring possible futures might include speculative fiction, a practice dating back centuries, from Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s 1771 vision of Paris in Year 2440 through to Frase’s (2016) recent call to explore a speculative social science fiction. Such work has the potential to engage a broad public in envisioning the future more effectively—and affectively—than standard planning approaches (e.g., Abbott 2016).

Developing a Sense-of-now through Now-making Strategies

When envisioning new ways for planning to apprehend time and temporalities, we need a few new time-related terms. A place is a specific point in a generic, undefined space. Placelessness, lack of sense of place, is detrimental to well-being because humans need a sense of place (we dwell in place, not in space). Thus, placemaking, or creating a sense of place, focuses on the uniqueness of places.

Let us assume that the position of a particular moment or Now in time is equivalent to the position of a particular place in space. Then, what we call the need for “sense of time” might really be a “sense-of-now.” As Heidegger, Husserl, and Bergson all variously suggest, human well-being requires a sense of when we are in the progression of time. Humans need a sense-of-now, in relation to past and future. Lack of sense of time cannot be called “timelessness” because this term refers to a positive quality of object permanence and because it is not a “sense of time” that we need but a sense-of-now. A place with a strong sense-of-now would be one where people know “when we are” and how this moment in time connects to past and future periods, events, and possibilities. Lacking a sense-of-now might then become “nowlessness.” Similarly, while placemaking strives to make a place unique, “making time” in general parlance means securing “free” time.

Thus, we refer (in perhaps ungainly terms) to efforts to put a place, event, city, or person in a unique and identifiable now or moment in time as “now-making.” Alongside the more familiar vocabulary of placemaking, we suggest planning needs to support sense-of-now and address nowlessness by developing now-making strategies. The challenge becomes to facilitate the answer to the question “What time is this place?” (Lynch 1972). This temporal orientation might be reimagined as a core aspiration for planning. Adopting a pragmatic or Meadian understanding of human action and understanding planning as bringing knowledge to action, the Now of the present “involves bringing the future into the act, and reconstructing the past in terms of the present” (Strauss 1991, 419). The future emerges out of the present, conditioned by the past but remains nonetheless an emplaced moment of possibility and choice.

Practically, how do we show present choices and emerging futures in the Now? While World Fairs can be seen as spectacles commodifying the future and manipulating audiences into accepting an imposed future (Benjamin 1970), they are also examples of now-making events insofar as they explicitly position space and society in time. Perhaps less problematically, Patrick Geddes’s “Learning the City” planning exhibitions sought to get audiences to think about the evolution of urban space through time and thus about how we dwell in time (Amati, Freestone, and Robertson 2017). Permanent “Urban studies centers” such as that in Bologna, Italy, seek to develop similar forms of civic exchange and engagement in the transformation of the city (see http://www.fondazioneinnovazioneurbana.it.). The possibility that events might (deliberately or otherwise) generate an altered sense of Now, stimulating new possibilities, recalls Benjamin’s jetztzeit. Massey’s (2005) notion of space becoming event also draws attention to something similar, indicating for instance how countercultural moments (e.g., May 1968, Woodstock, the 2017 women’s march) can reposition society in the Now, with an eye toward a better future.

Now-management for Coping with Changing Times

Planning’s relation to time also requires thinking about change, rates of change, and inflection points. Change is unavoidable, marks time, and entails risks. Resilience lies in preparing for and coping with change, not searching for an impossible state of equilibrium. Planning thus has a responsibility to prepare, orient, and care for possible changes and their myriad effects on people and places. Given the exploitation and spoiling of the future, we need to be guided by an ethics of care for our common fate, by the need to tend to interdependencies and to the future, that is, a focus on the “timeprints” (in addition to footprints) of our actions (Adam and Groves 2011). We also need to respond to urgent demands to explore transitions and pathways that may take us toward a more sustainable future.

Change operates on multiple levels, including growth and decay, spatial redistribution and migration, variations in intensity, disturbance and restoration cycles, and longer-term climatic changes. We also need to manage entropy and obsolescence and limit how much waste the future will inherit (Nowotny 1996). All changes have economic, environmental, social, and psychological costs and can stimulate fear, regret, and loss (Marris 2016).

Change is easiest when it responds to intentional and announced plans, and where conflicts are clarified, if not resolved. Change is difficult when it responds to external shocks or disasters. It is even more difficult when change is an effort to transition away from abandonment (waste, derelict buildings, neighborhoods, and lands) and in situations of conflict (in the absence of consultation and trust, in climates of unfair processes, and outcomes).

Planners frequently express frustration when they encounter opposition to change and development that they view as urgent or necessary. An improved relation to time might, however, prepare both planners and the publics they encounter to understand and cope with change. The considerations above lead us to consider “now management” (in addition to space management) as a new rationale for planning. Time and change are (and should be) evident in the social and physical world. In particular, our urban environments could (and should) not seek to reflect an impossible permanence or an artificially stable, reconstructed history but instead teach us about change. They should seek to ease change by making it transparent, announced, and piecemeal.

Understanding that sociospatial worlds are always in process, for example, might help cultivate the intuition toward duration that Bergson advocates and which seems to overlap with the existential imperatives of Heidegger’s “Dasein.” Connolly (2011, 72), drawing on Deleuze and Bergson, argues that time is neither empty nor homogeneous. Instead, we might seek to “[dwell] in a fecund moment of duration” opening up possibilities by learning how “multiple layers of the past resonate with things unfolding in the current situation.” This might offer a path to purposively (re)shape planning’s sense-of-time, toward a planning-in-time, and to strengthen the sense-of-time in urban places/dwellers, by building collective capacities to “read”, evaluate, appreciate, and value time and change in space.

Connolly (2011) further suggests that connecting with and shifting between different temporal registers by, for example, contemplating deep ecological timescales that extend across millions of years may offer rich potential for reframing political debate and recognizing matters of importance that extend beyond habitual planning horizons. Similar perspectives are advanced in Deleuzian-inspired planning theory, pointing toward a more open and less normalizing future orientation, enabling favorable futures to emerge from within complex and contingent sociomaterial contexts that are in a constant state of becoming (Hillier 2018). All of which gives rise to further questions: does Connolly’s idea of “dwelling-in-duration” offer a position from which to plan while accounting for the multiple forms of becoming that shape cities and lives? How can we learn not just to dwell in duration but also prepare our collective becoming for the future? How to avoid doomed efforts to control or micromanage the future and instead facilitate intentional change and adaptive steering in the direction of (normatively defined) desired futures? And how do we do this in realities marked by conflict and profound power inequalities?

Taking the Time to Plan, Improvising and Challenging Acceleration

Faced with both the neoliberal refrain that planning takes too long and the argument that social acceleration undermines thoughtful democratic governance, we must explore the possibilities and consequences of taking the time to plan. This includes exploring how new technologies accelerate planning and urban governance processes. However, it also entails making the case for the selective acceleration or deceleration of some forms of urban change, finding ways to stimulate deliberation and debate in response to the multiple temporalities affected by the development of cities. Accounting for the embodied energy and lifetime resource use of new building, for example, may reconfigure our understanding of good urban development and reshape thinking about investment, development, and growth. Challenging conceptions of urban development “cycles” as somehow “naturally” occurring temporal rhythms that must be accommodated to may meanwhile open up new possibilities for intervention (Weber 2015).

By encouraging practices of dwelling in duration as advocated by Connolly, it may become possible to make time for a form of planning that explores the multiple temporalities, synchronicities, and asynchronicities involved in urban change and their short-, medium-, and longer-term consequences. For instance, planning processes could consider not only the goals and objectives of multiple stakeholders but also the time frames they envision or expect, that is, when the costs and benefits of changes may accrue. Extending the call for “slow cities” and “slow building” (Weber, 2015), “slow planning” can be a selective tactic for accommodating multiple temporalities and concerns, tempering the negative impacts of urban development processes dominated by financial rates of returns or the preferred pacing of dominant actors (Raco, Durrant, and Livingstone 2018).

Innovation can happen during “pregnant moments” or “fugitive glimmers of becoming” when our action-oriented perception of time is briefly suspended (Connolly 2011, 33). Selective deceleration tactics could aim to set aside time to stimulate thinking about the now and the future by making time slow down or stand still. In practice, challenging acceleration could aim to support what Appadurai calls a “politics of patience” or “politics of slow.” In the case of development in Mumbai, the politics of slow allowed for local learning and incremental change and countered the “tyranny of emergency” in development (Appadurai 2001, 30; Raco, Durrant, and Livingstone 2018). In the Mexican Moctezuma Colonia, slowness and patience allowed things to “flow over time according to locally situated (rather than externally imposed) timeframe” (Lombard 2013, 817).

Connecting planning action into the wider flux of decision-making that shapes urban change may also involve the cultivation of identifiable forms of temporal expertise. This is implicitly recognized in planning theory already with Laws and Forester’s (2015) discussion of improvisation as a mode of planning practice. Improvisation involves a deep, intuitive connection to the possibilities inherent in what has come before, a capacity to seize the moment and open up new potentialities. Far from a slow, deliberative, or rational–technical mode of acting, improvisation is responsive, agile, and alive to emergent futures. Equally, it is important to remain aware of the uneven development of the capacity to aspire and engage with the future (Appadurai 2013), suggesting a need to work through nonexpert, everyday temporal horizons to cultivate inclusive opportunities to “dwell in duration.” In other words, we need to explicitly explore what it means to collectively and inclusively muddle through the various temporalities involved in plan making and urban change.

“Making Time” through Surprises in Urban Space

Due to complex bioneurological mechanisms, humans are subject to temporal distortions when time is perceived to slow down, speed up, stop, or run backward. ⁶ Features of space and experiences affect time perceptions in ways that are highly relevant to planning. For example, we overestimate shorter intervals and underestimate longer intervals (Fortin and Rousseau 1998). We recall recent events as more distant in time and distant events as more recent. Motivation decreases, and interruptions increase, perceived durations. Separation between stimuli affects perceived durations, for example, a trip covering a long distance appears to take longer than a shorter trip of the same duration (Sarrazin et al. 2004). These distortions can be used or corrected to modify perceived distances and durations. For instance, short blocks, landmarks in the distance (as opposed to the New York “canyon effect”), “time to destination” signs (e.g., “six-minute walk to City Hall” or “five blocks to City High School”), and signage about near-future events (e.g., “four minutes until the next bus,” “three more days until spring”) can reduce perceived distances and durations. The “Society for the slowing down of time” (Verein zur verzögerung der Zeit) and the Slow Movement take a different approach: they encourage people to slow down, bracket clock time and its false urgencies, to enjoy the “flow” of pleasurable activities. Social events that can slow down or stop time include music, myths, and rituals, which Levi-Strauss (1964) called “machines for the suppression of time” (p. 276 in Thrift 1977).

Perhaps most importantly, “oddball” unexpected stimuli (experiencing awe, surprises, changes, disruptions) “slow down” perceived time. Deceleration increases our focus and gives us the sense of having more time (Aaen-Stockdale et al. 2011). This oddball effect slows time during stress-induced fight-or-flight responses, but also, and more positively, when we dedicate all our attention to what we do or to making sense of the world around us. Adult minds rarely step outside physical and mental routines and our brains, adapted to repeated stimuli, disengage from the present moment. Thus, adult time “flies.” Calls for reconnecting to our “inner child” seek to exploit the link between happiness and being “in the flow,” that is, completely absorbed in the task at hand (Csikszentmihalyi 2002). With new stimuli, awe, and surprise “oddball” events, cities might therefore decelerate time. Unexpected events can make time slow down, anchoring us “in the now.”

This is something mindfulness meditation practitioners, flaneurs, and flash mob participants, build on. For instance, the New York–based “Improv Everywhere” group organized a time–travel subway prank where sets of twins staged arguments between a man and his future self (enacted by his twin) about the merit of building a time machine. A surprise pizza delivery to a random subway car, reenactments of scenes from the Matrix, and a car alarm symphony in a mall parking lot are examples of memorable events that audiences of commuters and shoppers probably experienced as surprising events, anchoring them deeply in the Now that day. Planners too could seek to make the urban landscape surprising rather than aim for predictability.

Opening “Progressive” Futures in the Here and Now

Heidegger ([1927] 1996, 2010) locates the possibility of free will in the Now while also emphasizing the future orientation of Dasein, a “being-there” that is active in the world through projections and projects. In this sense, both Bergson and Heidegger think of the present as a moment of freedom (“the only resemblance between Bergson and Heidegger—and it is a considerable one—lies here: both base the specificity of time on a conception of the open” [Deleuze 1986 in Massey 2015]).

As Dasein gives ontological basis to the future, it also opens the possibility—and existentialists would add the responsibility—of choice and free will. As we anticipate and project toward the future, what comes out of the future is our past (our “baggage”) embodied in our “having-been-ness” (Gewesenheit). The present is characterized by freedom, a moment when possibilities open, a moment of vision or action. When we anticipate the future and act, our having-been-ness brings action into the present. This present moment of vision provides a glimpse of the Dasein, the free individual, informed and shaped by her past and freely choosing a path toward her future. Thus, time is the process of unity (“ecstases”) of future, past, and present.

These considerations are important for planning: can we rethink and reframe the “now” as the freedom to plan? The moment where our past and baggage shape our options, and where we act now into a future? Can a city’s having-been-ness morph into some kind of collective and multiple “Dasein”: a capacity to envision desirable change, beyond teleologies of progress (Campbell 2005)? Can cities and/or planning processes somehow render the presents’ “ecstatic temporality” visible, joyful, or productive? Can the new be consciously and thoughtfully constructed as an actualization of Deleuze’s differences, singularities, divergence, and multiplicities in practice? Such a mode of planning must navigate the tensions between planning’s desire to secure a normalized future (Connell 2009), the need for preparedness and flexibility, and the openness to emergent possibility that theorists advocate (e.g., Beauregard 2015; Hillier 2018).

Recognizing an imperative to open the future raises a range of challenges for practice: to render planning processes exciting, novel, and important; joyful and positive opportunities for communities to engage in envisioning their shared future(s). Such a vision stands in contrast to much of what passes as planning where processes become ensnared in problematic zoning/legal (“our hands are tied”), economic (“we just don’t have the budget”), or political (“we don’t have the support of council/developers”).

Urban “Time Services”: Anchoring the Now in the Flow of Time and Accommodating All Biorhythms

Several types of planning interventions could provide a variety of “time services.” This can involve marking the flow of time in the urban landscape, supporting biorhythms, helping us predict timing and durations, or creating oddball awe-inspiring moments. “Time services” might open the possibility of intentional steering of temporal dynamics, speeding up or slowing time where desirable, whether by “extending the experience of the present” or by “making visible a socially acceptable future” (Connell, 2009). Such moves would resonate with psychological research as well as phenomenological ideas about time that each emphasizes the subjective variability of temporal perception and the capacity for different stimuli to speed up, slow down, intensify, or dilute the experience of time (e.g., Aaen-Stockdale et al. 2011).

We might also consider how to mark time and change in space. Artifacts and events can make time stand still. With historic preservation and monuments, we slow down urban change while informing the future in the present. In this perspective, historic preservation should not become “heritage branding” (Hetherington 2013), seek to capitalize on the rhythms of a place, or profit from a local experience economy (Degen 2018). Instead, planning for historic structures should seek to retain elements of the past that place us and the Now in the flow of time, recognizing that: “we preserve present signals of the past or control the present to satisfy our image of the future” (Lynch 1972, 65). We preserve some structures deemed “historic,” while demolishing others. Sometimes we preserve whole districts to create a grand illusion of the past remaining alive (downtown Tombstone). Sometimes we collage historic and futuristic structures (e.g., the Royal Ontario Museum with its glass shard emerging from the historic building). The collage approach signals change more effectively than an artificial movie-set-looking preserved downtown and also has the advantage of marking open futures.

Planning should actively display or render visible open and adaptable futures, for example, with flexible uses of space that allow for growth, decay, shrinking, and change. Signals of futurism, of long-term change starting “now,” help anticipate and prepare for further changes to come. The first iconic skyscrapers paved the way for many more mundane high rises. Architectural collages of old and new can prepare us for the forms of the next century. Planning should provide the public with clues about future states and clearly communicate public intentions about the near future. This can include statements and visual cues about involuntary changes (e.g., climate change, as by marking the elevation of floodwaters or water supplies). It can also make explicit what Merton (1984) calls “social expectation of durations,” so that people can anticipate what is likely to happen in the future and the prospective timing of change. For instance, “coming soon” signs can signal urban densification projects. Similarly, Lynch calls for “prototype centers” or “museums of the future.” Building on planning’s “exhibition” and urban studies center traditions and adopting a more participatory mode, these could be called “workshops for the future,” public spaces where residents can explore the future and reflect about new possibilities.

As they mark the flow of time, cities and urban activities should also support a variety of body times. We cannot all be expected to rise at 6 a.m., commute at 7:30 a.m., leave work at 6 p.m., eat at 7 p.m., and sleep at 11 p.m. Babies, teenagers, adults, and the elderly have different wake/sleep cycles. This also raises questions of urban services. What do cities have to offer teenagers when they emerge in late summertime evenings? Where can the elderly go for a healthy breakfast at 5 a.m. on a Tuesday? Viewed like this, time can be understood in its equity dimension, enabling access to time and ensuring that the burdens of temporal dysfunctions do not fall disproportionately on certain people (e.g., single working parents who need to navigate public transit during peak commuting hours or need access to formal services outside working hours). Italian experiments in “time planning” are instructive here, involving the production of “time plans,” investigation of how diverse temporal needs and dysfunctions affect urban life, and proposing ways of realigning activities in time to enable more equitable or innovative use of time and space (Belloni 1998). ⁷

Cities should also support our preoccupations with actual time and biorhythms and provide “temporal cues” of circadian socioecological times, near future time, and long-term evolutionary time (Thrift 1977, 83). Clocks on city walls allow the coordination of activities and provide the all-important answer to daily concerns about the time. Urban design features could also support biological clocks with displays of time that synch us to natural cycles and make change visible, for example, marking sunrise, sunset, tides and seasons on modified clocks, or with festivals, seasonal lights, fireworks. At the streetscape scale, planting deciduous trees rather than evergreens reveals the passing of seasons and experiencing fall and spring gets us ready for harsh winters and summers. The aesthetics of passing time are perhaps best captured by watercourses, and riverfront promenades are often favorite city walks (Portland, San Antonio, Savannah). At the building scale, choosing reflective facades or sandstone that turns pink in the sunrise and sunset can confirm biorhythms and indicate that the day is starting or ending.

Now-making and Placemaking: Embodying Time and Identity in Space

Now-making implies that users of a specific place have a sense of now. To support this, clocks could be designed not only to display clock time and biological rhythms but also “shadow times,” for example geological times. A local sense of now is also one that places the current moment (now) in the perspective of broader local cultures, stories, and histories.

Bakhtin’s ([1981] 1900) concept of “chronotopes” illustrates the idea that space can be used to give form to time. Chronotopes are:

points in geography of a community where time and space intersect and fuse. Time takes on flesh and becomes visible…likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time and history…chronotopes thus stand as monuments to the community itself. (p. 7; cited in Basso 1996, 43–44)

Raco, Henderson, and Bowlby (2008) talk of a “principle of persistence” where collective identities and legacies shape ideas, attitudes, expectations, and imaginations. Degen (2018) describes narratives and lived experiences involving memories of space as a form of resistance to urban renewal. In a different setting, plaques in Paris commemorate the deportation of school children and massacres of Algerians at the hands of the French police during World War II and in 1961–1962. These plaques, installed many decades after the events, acknowledge the events and the suffering of communities—as do monuments to fallen soldiers. Publicly remembering the experience of disenfranchised groups can help anchor their present in history, opening the possibility of different futures. In less dramatic circumstances, community planning processes that aim to “help a community experience itself in time” (Baum 1999, 10) should also aim to excavate understandings of the past in order to effectively link the present to possible futures (Erfan 2017) asking what made us who we are? When and where? Where do we go next?

Making Time for Inclusive Temporalities

Urban forms and activities should support a variety of cultural temporalities and be attentive to the challenges involved in synchronizing or working across temporalities. Different cultures and social groups have different understandings, perceptions, and measures of lived and abstract time. Creating cities that are open to multiple temporalities is a challenge that some nations are beginning to take on. For instance, white (Pakehas) and Maori culture in New Zealand operate with different relationships to time. Maori procedural rights create moments for Maori customary time to prevail while Pakehas respectfully wait. There may also be reasons to provide opportunities for female time, Latino/Latina time, Black time, Indian times, and so on. These temporalities should be determined by the communities involved rather than the dominant rhythms of late capitalist accelerationism.

Planning that is sensitive to multiple temporalities and varied senses-of-time must understand cities as “polyrhythmic ensembles” (Degen 2017, 145). The human experience of change and choice comprises a mosaic of temporalities, consisting of each actor’s own temporality, his or her eigen time (Tada 2018), of collective social times, and of natural times (Tabboni 2001). Dates are charged with different meanings for different people: time marked by the traces, persistence, and legacies of past events; generational time through which societies evolve; and time mediated through narratives about the evolution and change of society and self (Browne 2014). These multiple temporalities vary across communities and individuals, operate at different speeds and rhythms, and coexist and collide daily in cities (Crang 2001).

Planning should support these multiple rhythms and temporalities in sensory and temporal urban practices, with a special attention to the temporalities of the least advantaged. Urbanism, architecture, and signs can materialize in space the passing of time as well as diverse histories, memories, and experiences. To guide this effort, Lefebvre (2004) calls for “rhythm-analyses” to identify the activities that punctuate urban life and give residents a sense of time and place. This entails asking: Who is using what space? When? and How? At the core of these rhythms are the circadian (daily but variable) rhythms which form urban timescapes (Bates 2006; Adam 1990). Control over timescapes is a constant stake in the politics of urban change, whether in visions of a 24/7 city, heritage branding, or discourse about areas that are “stuck in time” and in need of accelerated change (Degen 2018; Raco, Durrant, and Livingstone 2018).

Based on a solid understanding of timescapes and urban rhythms, communities and planners can propose locally relevant modes of time representations. Indicators of times (calendars, clocks, festivals) in the landscape can display Islamic, Jewish, Chinese, Christian, and Orthodox calendars and festivals. Public discourses, narratives, and policy documents can make explicit multiple times, including residents’ and developers’ diverging temporalities.