TY  - GEN
AB  - 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.
AD  - University of Chicago
AU  - Journey, Rebecca Kate
DA  - 2021-08
DO  - 10.6082/uchicago.3485
DO  - doi
ED  - Joseph P. Masco
ED  - Michael Fisch
ED  - Catherine K. Fennell
ED  - Hussein A. Agrama
ID  - 3485
KW  - Cultural anthropology
KW  - Design
KW  - Urban planning
KW  - design
KW  - environment
KW  - eugenics
KW  - futurity
KW  - infrastructure
KW  - urbanity
L1  - https://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/3485/files/Journey_uchicago_0330D_16021.pdf
L2  - https://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/3485/files/Journey_uchicago_0330D_16021.pdf
L4  - https://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/3485/files/Journey_uchicago_0330D_16021.pdf
LA  - eng
LK  - https://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/3485/files/Journey_uchicago_0330D_16021.pdf
N2  - 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.
PB  - University of Chicago
PY  - 2021-08
T1  - Future Perfect: Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow
TI  - Future Perfect: Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow
UR  - https://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/3485/files/Journey_uchicago_0330D_16021.pdf
Y1  - 2021-08
ER  -