ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the notions of future that are embedded in the notion of land-use planning, sometimes known as Urban Planning or Town and Country Planning. It highlights the different temporal horizons of the future, the varying notions of human agency in achieving particular futures, whether dangerous or mundane, and the very different means of conceptualizing both a static future of the imagination, and a dynamic trajectory between now and then. The chapter shows how Utopian or Dystopian futures bounce in and out of the mundane practice of governmental planning to show how bureaucratic processes work to reduce broader future concepts to manageable mechanisms. Anthropological analysis of the future offers a means to disaggregate the ways that the future is of concern to different people at different times, in different ways, and enables us to see how particular futures may become dominant for shorter or longer moments, or how particular futures appeal in certain contexts.
