#2 I call on
Federica Bueti
I call on the City of Esch-sur-Alzette to create permanent civic spaces where residents, researchers, artists, and policymakers can collectively imagine and debate futures that exceed the dominant frameworks of regeneration, innovation, and economic growth. By building institutions that sustain plurality, asymmetry, and disagreement rather than demanding consensus, Esch can protect imagination as a democratic resource rather than reducing it to an instrument of urban development.
What kinds of institutions allow imagination not to be captured by governance? During my time in Esch, I reflected on the ways imagination is increasingly organised through the language of regeneration, innovation, resilience, and participation. These terms appear open and progressive, yet they often delimit in advance what kinds of futures are considered possible, desirable, or politically legitimate.
In my research, I describe this process as the siege of imagination. Imagination is not disappearing; rather, it is being calibrated. Creative thinking is encouraged when it enhances competitiveness, urban branding, or measurable innovation, but constrained when it questions the assumptions that underpin existing political and economic structures. The result is not the absence of imagination but the narrowing of its horizon.
Esch is currently undergoing significant urban transformation. Like many post-industrial European cities, it faces the challenge of balancing regeneration with social diversity, historical complexity, and ecological transition. The danger is not regeneration itself but the tendency for planning processes to privilege predictable and administratively legible futures while marginalising forms of life, knowledge, and social organisation that cannot easily be translated into policy indicators or development frameworks.
The most important question facing cities today is not simply how to imagine better futures, but how to protect the conditions under which different futures remain imaginable. Building institutions that preserve this openness may be one of the most urgent forms of democratic infrastructure we can create.
I thus call on the City of Esch-sur-Alzette to create permanent spaces within its urban planning and cultural governance where proposals that do not fit existing models of regeneration, innovation, or economic development can be collectively explored before they are evaluated. Cities should not only administer the future; they should create institutional conditions in which genuinely different futures can be imagined.