Literary Festival 2016: The Future City: cruel or consoling Utopia? [Audio]

Speaker(s): Darran Anderson, Dr Matthew Beaumont, Professor Rachel Cooper | The Future City, as an idea that often relies upon Utopian thinking to sustain itself, can be as cruel as it is consoling. Even as it makes possible investment into urban space as a site of future fulfillment, it regularly fails to deliver upon this promise. This panel asks what futures such Utopian thinking makes available for the city and what present realities it denies? It will query more specifically the Utopias that have come to structure London’s own particular futures. What Utopian thinking is operative, for instance, in a city so firmly structured around the logic of speculation intrinsic to finance capital? And what futures might present citizens be imagining for themselves? Darran Anderson is author of Imaginary Cities (@Oniropolis). He has written on speculative urban themes for publications such as Dezeen, Citylab and Aeon, on cities directly from Paris to Phnom Penh, and has given talks on the int