ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 discusses what the plurality of modernities means and what consequences such an understanding has on the future imaginaries of London and Paris. It invites us to consider new ways of characterising the relationship of past, present and future in the context of cities and in relation to what we can learn from the practice of urban history. Central to the notion of modernities developed in the book is recovering past visions of the future, including the routes not taken, so that we learn what and who exactly was sidelined, partly as a result of symbols that gathered interests around them, not least the steam-engine running upon a railway, the very symbol that H. G. Wells chose to characterise the nineteenth century. The chapter concludes by answering two questions: What exactly does it mean to remember future events? Where does the threshold of past, present and future leave us when thinking about London’s and Paris’ modernities?
