How to Engage Reflexively with Messy Presents and Potential Futures: An Audio Walk for Planners

This article calls for planning practitioners to engage in future-making practices that move from projection to reflexive engagement. We demonstrate how the audio walk, as a method for reflexive engagement, can assist planners in developing future-making practices that 1) strengthen planners’ ability to see places and issues through local perspectives, 2) help planners accommodate the messy present in future plans and 3) make planners recognize their own roles and responsibility as active generators of specific images of the future. We conclude that any representations of the future are performative; they bring the future into being and therefore enable or constrain certain (re)configurations of it.