Sacred acts in secular times

This project investigates the dramaturgical dimension of urban future-making. More specifically, it examines three intersecting dramaturgical elements that surface when urban futures become the object of public – and often polarized – debate: rituals, narratives, and icons.

• social theories of performance

• social theories of imagination

• futures studies

• urban commons 

• citizen collectives

Conceptual framework

Rituals refer to choreographed, time- and place-bound performances through which social actors give meaning to their surrounding lifeworld. Narratives are the shared stories people tell themselves and others to make sense of the overwhelming complexity of urban life – stories that draw moral distinctions between good and bad, hero and villain, past and future. Icons, finally, are symbolically charged and often contested materialities – wind turbines, skyscrapers, autostradas – that embody imagined futures in the present. Together, these elements constitute what this project calls the dramaturgy of urban future-making.

Aims

Using this threefold lens, the project traces how interventions in the built environment generate polarized arenas of meaning-making across three domains: mobility, regeneration, and architecture:

• Mobility – The project examines the dramaturgical tactics deployed by Zukunft Elbinsel Wilhelmsburg, a citizen organization framing Hamburg’s southern corridor as a common good. Their actions reveal how rituals, narratives, and iconicity were mobilized to contest and reimagine the symbolically charged A10 motorway planned through the area.

• Urban regeneration – The project analyzes Hamburg’s International Building Exhibition (2007–2013) as an extended ‘effervescent’ ritual in which architects, engineers, and local activists used narrativity and iconicity – for example, a bunker transformed into an energy hub – to articulate competing visions of the ‘city of tomorrow’.

• Architecture – The project explores the public controversy that erupted when Antwerp industrialist and art patron Fernand Huts purchased the city’s iconic ‘Farmers’ Tower’ and commissioned Daniel Libeskind to redesign it. The tower became a symbolic proxy in a five-year social drama over communal bonds, skyline evolution, and the city’s global aspirations.

Results

First, the project demonstrates that future-making is a deeply symbolic practice. This challenges what I call the disenchantment thesis in futures studies. According to this thesis, the onset of modernity secularized the future: as Adam and Groves (2007) argue in Future Matters, the future shifted ‘from the gods to the people’, becoming a domain to administer, control, and govern. Yet even if the future is no longer governed by divine forces, it remains shaped through symbolic infrastructures – rituals, narratives, and icons – that imbue future-making with meaning, affect, and cultural resonance. Hence the project’s title: Sacred Acts in Secular Times.

Second, the project shows that debates and conflicts about urban futures unfold in an episodic rather than continuous manner. Here, the notion of liminality – from the Latin limen, meaning threshold – plays a central role. Public debates about the future can be understood as threshold moments: stretches of time in which the future becomes contingent, opened up, and subject to multiple possible trajectories. During these liminal episodes, the usual limits to thought and action loosen, allowing for intensified meaning-making supported by the dramaturgical elements of rituals, narratives, and icons. During these liminal episodes of future-making, also, the built environment moves from a dormant background presence to the very forefront of public consciousness.

Third, the project sheds new light on the performative dimensions of power in urban future-making. While critical urban studies have long emphasized the unequal distribution of material and economic resources, this project expands the focus to performative unevenness. Although engineers, activists, planners, and citizens all participate as meaning-making actors, they possess unequal levels of performative power – that is, unequal capacity to steer, stabilize, and institutionalize particular futures. The project thus finds that the ability to shape urban futures depends on a paradoxical position: being both inside and outside the dramaturgy of future-making. In other words, future-making power hinges not only on crafting compelling narratives but also on shaping the very script of the debate, determining who can speak – as well as when and on what terms.