Trapped in the Present: Planning, Architecture and Postmodern Time

While the term ‘postmodernism’ may have been exhausted, the temporality of our own era remains trapped in a postmodern consciousness of time, a ‘now-time’, visible in the short-term focus of governments and the emaciation of planning, in low interest rates encouraging spending rather than saving, in the dominance of immediate gratification, in the ‘curation’ of culture via Instagram and social media. Modern conceptions of time were vital in the transition from traditional to modern societies – namely, the emergence of the idea of linear time instead of cyclical notions of temporality. This chapter will identify three temporal modes within modernity: the focus on the past, which was critical in Enlightenment and was accompanied by the emergence of modern historiography; the focus on the future, which begins with the modern utopians Saint Simon and Charles Fourier and reaches its nadir with postwar planning; and the focus on the present, which will be associated with neoliberalism and postmodernity. All these, it will be argued, are modern, and differentiated from traditional societies’ temporalities. The following chapter will anchor these temporal notions in key issues relating to our cities via the lenses of architecture and planning, two disciplines in which time plays a crucial part.