Speculation turns cities into battlegrounds over care

emancipatory speculation – From a digital map that rewrites a buried river’s story in São Paulo to the contested fate of Berlin’s Checkpoint Charlie, speculative thinking is showing up as something more than art theory: a method that can either erase or protect public futures. Even sola

In the speculative imagination that swirls around cities, one word keeps getting quietly redefined. Speculation. often treated as a financial engine or a marketing promise. is being used here as something else entirely: a practice for defending whose lives count—and what kind of future a place is allowed to hold.

That shift sits at the center of the current issue of the Austrian journal dérive. in an introduction by Frank Müller and Anke Schwarz. They describe speculative urbanism as not only a study of how late capitalism reshapes environments through financialization and commodification. but also a field rich with “diverse types of aspirational imagination.” In cities—where competing futures collide—speculation can be wielded as a tool for imagining alternatives that directly challenge the commodification of human life and the natural world.

Yet the authors warn that speculation is not automatically emancipatory. Authoritarian and reactionary movements also rely on speculative visions of the future. What distinguishes emancipatory speculation. in their account. is its willingness to question existing power structures and “expand the space of possibilities.” Rather than offering technological salvation or utopian certainty. it spotlights “contemporary and historically embedded inequalities. dependencies. and constellations of power. ” and presses the question of what conditions might allow fairer urban futures to emerge.

Used this way. speculation becomes “the source and instrument of a collective. intersubjective and intergenerational practice of care.” It is not abstract. It is geographical—rooted in orientation toward the material world—and it asks for more than daydreaming. Designing “tangible urban utopias that give everyone the chance of a liveable life” requires the ability to “think with the earth. ” always aware of the relationship between the conceptual and the material. In this frame. speculation is simultaneously a theoretical approach and a practical method of critical urban research: a way of linking imagination. political struggle. and the material transformation of cities.

That argument gains teeth in the work exploring speculative cartography. Laura Kemmer. Ana Luiza Nobre and David Sperling examine how maps can be used to rediscover suppressed urban histories and inspire community resistance to real-estate speculation. They describe urban development as an agent that destroys ecological systems and cultural memory. “Rivers are channelled into straight paths or buried to create space for buildings and capital flows. ” they write. while local communities and histories disappear from the landscape.

In São Paulo’s Bixiga neighbourhood, the Saracura River once flowed through the area. Now it runs beneath layers of concrete infrastructure and is largely absent from official maps and planning documents. To counter that erasure. the Ground Atlas team organized a “collaborative mapping project.” The effort was inspired partly by the discovery of archaeological artefacts from a historically documented but previously unlocated quilombo—a community of former slaves—during the construction of a new metro station.

Researchers, artists, activists, Indigenous representatives and local residents produced a digital map built from letters addressed to the hidden river. The letters link stories, images, and objects to sites across the neighbourhood. In one letter. a fictional Hydrolinguistic Research Group offers a speculative translation: it presents the river’s “sound frequencies” in Baniwa. an Indigenous language. and then into Portuguese. The speculative element is presented as essential: “It shifts the framework of scientific authority and opens a space for thinking of water not just as a resource. but as a speaking. expressive medium.”.

Another letter is written from the perspective of a quilombo resident. using archaeological finds as a “scientific foundation for an act of fabulation.” The map’s method is blunt about its target: by filling gaps in official archives with speculative narratives. it highlights voices and relationships normally excluded from urban planning.

Crossing from one city to another, the issue also traces how speculation can become a political lever—this time not on paper, but in the machinery of planning, debate, and public pressure.

Christoph Sommer describes what happened in Berlin soon after the Berlin Wall fell. when investors turned their attention to the real estate along its course “with the aim of rapidly transforming socialist land into capitalist structures.” The story centers on the eventual decision to conserve the historic Checkpoint Charlie site for public use—and how that outcome was shaped by planning procedures. political debate and civic activism.

Over the years. various plans were mooted. most recently a large-scale commercial development comprising shops. hotels and a small museum to be leased by the developer to the state. The idea that the state itself could acquire the land and use it for a museum and memorial was dismissed as unfeasible. with a public-private partnership framed as the only possibility.

That structure became the fault line. Historians. heritage experts. activists. and local initiatives opposed the project. fearing the development’s dense buildings and commercial nature would erase the site’s historical significance. In Sommer’s account. the planners’ own participatory work—intended to gather expert feedback—unexpectedly became a space of political resistance. Participatory formats allowed critics to form alliances and legitimized their concerns. culminating in the formation of a powerful “counter-public to the investment project.”.

The opponents ultimately succeeded. Instead of a fully privatized development. parts of the land were designated for public purposes. including a memorial and educational site. The result offers a concrete rebuttal to a frequent critique of participation—that it is doomed to legitimize preconceived intentions—because the outcome. in the issue’s framing. “shows that participation is not. as is often and rightly criticized. doomed to legitimize preconceived intentions.”.

If Berlin shows speculation fighting for public meaning, another section confronts the way futures are packaged when money gets involved.

For decades, popular visions of the future city have been dominated by cyberpunk’s neon-lit corporate power. Against that aesthetic, solarpunk emerged as a greener, more utopian vision of the future. But Anja Lind writes that even solarpunk has been co-opted by “neoliberal capital and mainstreamed to greenwash everything from authoritarian regimes to yoghurt companies.” The Gaza Riviera proposal is offered as an example of how even “fantasies of colonial dispossession cannot afford to decentre ecology.”.

Lind also insists that solarpunk practitioners resist those depictions. They satirize the greenwashing and forward “new. vibrant and critical post-capitalist speculations.” What unites recent solarpunk novels is not a neat. packaged aesthetic. but “radical communalism.” A recurring motif is the creation of intentional communities that experiment with new forms of urban life. including settlements built from salvaged materials.

Where corporate urbanism promotes “monumentally greened smart architecture. ” solarpunk emphasizes slower. more communal forms of life: shared spaces. local food systems and participatory governance. “The solarpunk city is built out of the abundance of shared goods. decommodification. and social justice. not out of extracted. colonized bodies. ” Lind writes.

That is why the issue treats speculative fiction as more than entertainment. By offering “a radically different consensus of the future city. ” solarpunk helps readers imagine alternative ways to arrange communities amid the twin pressures of climate crisis and social fragmentation. When the future feels locked in. this kind of science fictional speculation argues for a different kind of imagination—one that still has agency.

The issue closes with a sharp reminder of what is at stake when people try to work their way out of crisis. “SF has never been more timely, speculation never more important to address.”

A debate about what cities become is always. at bottom. a debate about care: who gets protected. what histories survive. which commons are defended. and who is allowed to speak. In dérive’s pages, speculation doesn’t float above the city. It touches the buried river. the contested landmark. and the contested meaning of a “greener future”—and it keeps asking whether the future will be sold. or shared.

speculative urbanism dérive journal emancipatory speculation urban futures speculative cartography quilombo Saracura River Bixiga Ground Atlas Berlin Checkpoint Charlie participatory planning counter-public solarpunk greenwashing decommodification intentional communities