Final conference: Urban future-making: Situating agency within the built environment

Urban future-making: Situating agency within the built environment, 05–06 May 2025, HafenCity University Hamburg

On 05–06 May 2025, the research training group (RTG) "Urban future-making: Professional agency across time and scale" hosted an international conference, bringing together nearly 200 participants for two days of interdisciplinary dialogue and exchange. The conference titled "Urban future-making: Situating agency within the built environment" served as concluding event of the first cohort of the RTG. It welcomed over 100 presenters from across Germany, but also Brazil, Israel, the UK, Belgium, Italy, Turkey, India, Singapore, France. Structured around six thematic streams - Arenas, Drivers, Materiality, Resources, Tactics, and Practicing urban future-making - the conference explored how agency is understood and activated within the built environment, across both local and global urban contexts.

Contributions reflected a broad spectrum of approaches and scales, from grassroots planning tactics and experimental platforms to questions of infrastructure, material legacies, and co-creative urban practices. Discussions engaged with the politics of greening, circular design, participatory education, and more-than-human perspectives, highlighting the diverse forces, actors, and imaginaries shaping urban change today. Throughout, a recurring concern was how temporary or small-scale experiments might scale, transfer, or transform into structural interventions, while remaining attentive to justice, learning, and the maintenance of radical democratic space.

The first day concluded with an inspiring keynote lecture by Prof. Dr. Maarten Hajer (Utrecht University), titled “Urbanism in a radical age: Using exhibitions as dramaturgies of change”. Hajer proposed the phenomenon of exhibitions as a strategic tool for staging new urban imaginaries and enabling transformative thinking. The day ended with a shared conference dinner in the university building, a lively continuation of the day’s discussions. The atmosphere across both days was marked by openness, critical curiosity, and a shared commitment to collaborative, practice-sensitive approaches to urban futures.

Organization and programme

You will find the programme, the book of abstracts, the list of presenters, the timetable and the maps of the HCU below.

Selected papers will be invited for publication in our series of edited volumes with transcript: https://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-7467-5/conflicts-in-urban-future-making/