@article{Experimental:3485,
      recid = {3485},
      author = {Journey, Rebecca Kate},
      title = {Future Perfect: Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow},
      publisher = {The University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2021-08},
      pages = {175},
      abstract = {This dissertation asks what it means to frame climate  change as a problem of urban design in a Scandinavian port  city, and then locates that question within a genealogy of  evolutionary thought. Through an ethnography of green  infrastructure design and experience in the Danish Capital  Region, it follows Copenhagen Municipality’s Climate Plan  to build the world’s first carbon-neutral capital, and by  extension, to shape a citizenry equipped to realize its  promise. The dissertation is fundamentally concerned with  material and discursive practices of future-making, and  more broadly, ‘sustainable development’ in a city presently  enacted as a green design prototype, as well as the  situated practices required to advance its iteration. To  that end it traces the cultural geometries and racialized  imaginaries that delineate the Danish model through a  detailed ethnographic rendering. 

As a performative  artifact, the Danish model stages an interactive mockup of  a fully optimizable urban future, from climate-adapted  districts and the green transit systems connecting them  right up to and including perfected people. In this  ‘future-proof’ built environment, human inhabitants appear  as design objects themselves, physically sculpted and  spatially sorted via a reproductive geography of  imagination and management. Most simply, Future Perfect  argues that the aspirational project of prototyping  Copenhagen—the iteration of a seamless city, populated by  perfected people and objects—can be grasped as a  contemporary expression of eugenic ideology.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/3485},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.3485},
}