Preliminary Notes on the Nature—Urbanization—Science Fiction

This article explores the potential of science fiction as a critical and speculative framework for rethinking the relationship between urbanization, nature, and technology in the twenty-first century. Against inherited binaries that oppose the urban and the natural—and with them, the human and the nonhuman, the city and its extended landscapes, the machinic and the organic—I propose the notion of a science-fictional urbanism: a post-anthropocentric, posthuman, and postcapitalist horizon for design thinking in the age of planetary urbanization. Through a combination of theoretical reflection and conceptual analysis, I argue that science fiction’s usefulness for the design disciplines lies in its defamiliarizing tendencies, which can productively and strategically be applied to estrange dominant urban imaginaries, enabling the imagination of radical yet spatially-plausible modes of cohabitation with both ecological and (emergent) machinic forms of otherness.