Cities of the future?: megacities and the space/time of urban modernity

This essay examines the popular representation of megacities as “cities of the future.” It argues that rather than remapping the familiar, Eurocentric geography of urban modernity, this discourse reasserts relations between historical time and geographical space that remain centered in Europe and North America. By focusing on one of the so-called “megacities of the Third World” (Bogotá, Colombia), this essay also considers what kinds of governmental projects the discourse on the megacity inspires and enables. It then concludes with the provocation to imagine forms of urban theory and practice that challenge the imagined spatial and temporal coordinates on which these projections of urban futurity are based.