This chapter discusses how the anticipatory gaze — what some call ‘expectancy’ — is formalised in the tools and techniques used by private consultants given the uncertainties associated with large-scale investments and the volatility of the global economy. It makes the claim that planning technocracies can be understood through their ‘instruments’ and ‘governmental technologies’. These refer to the complex of mundane programmes, calculations, techniques, apparatuses, documents, and procedures through which authorities seek to embody and give effect to governmental ambitions. By enquiring the inner working logics of technical instruments used by policy makers and planners, it is possible to explain why certain expertise becomes so central in the definition of public policies and to question how technocratic logics of planning are enacted and institutionalised. The chapter thus pays attention to the actors that create and use techniques of anticipation in order to understand their motivations and ambitions.
This book uses an international perspective and draws on a wide range of new conceptual and empirical material to examine the sources of conflict and cooperation within the different landscapes of knowledge that are driving contemporary urban change. Based on the premise that historically established systems of regulation and control are being subject to unprecedented pressures, scholars critically reflect on the changing role of planning and governance in sustainable urban development, looking at how a shift in power relations between expert and local cultures in western planning processes has blurred the traditional boundaries between public, private and voluntary sectors.
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nanotechnology: anticipatory knowledge and the governance of affect , Area , 39 ( 2 ): 156 – 65 . Amazon ( 2013 ) Amazon Prime Air , YouTube www.youtube.com/watch?v=98BIu9dpwHU . Amazon ( 2015 ) Amazon Prime Air , YouTube www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXo_d6tNWuY . Amazon ( 2016 ) Amazon Prime Air’s first customer delivery , YouTube www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNySOrI2Ny8 . Amazon ( 2019 ) Amazon Prime Air’s new delivery drone , YouTube www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HJtmx5f1Fc . Amazon ( nd ) Prime Air , www.amazon.com/Amazon-Prime-Air/b?ie=UTF8&node
technical expertise, but it is striking how central and dominant specific assessment models, contracts or development agreements are in the organisation of complex planning processes. In Chicago, Weber uncovers a hyper-professionalised business of ‘future builders’ that determine planning visions and planning goals at early stages in the process. These firms operate as the gatekeepers of anticipatory knowledge and combine different capacities to forecast, project and engage. In Luxemburg, Dörry analyses how financial investors are seeking remunerable investments on land
