City Shock: Planning the Unexpected

In a world of seemingly ever-increasing instability, many urban planning decisions seem to be governed not by vision, but by fear--fear of disaster, of change, of the unknown. What can we learn from this state of affairs? Can such fear be made beneficial? Is it conceivable that €˜fear€ might even offer a kind of guide in matters of urban planning? Guided by fantasy and invention rather than science, City Shock: Planning the Unexpected proposes ten €˜what if€ scenarios, imagining how each of these scenarios could play out in the Dutch landscape between 2018 and 2047. In a narrative composed of feasible but unlikely headlines, a series of newspaper-style spreads report on fictitious future catastrophic events, exposing possible causes and consequences. City Shock is the sixth book in Winy Maas€ Why Factory€s Future Cities series.