How can urban mobilities design imaginaries articulate ‘matters of concern’?

Some urban design proposals are primarily imaginaries. They may present solutions to set urban problems, but their main agency is to experiment with reimagining the urban. This is urban design as ‘critical’ and ‘speculative’ design meant to probe our assumptions (Dunne and Raby 2013).

The paper investigates this proposition through a studio on the contested mobility project, the Third Limfjord Alignment, Aalborg, Denmark, “Delta Bridge” (Thorø and Nielsen 2016). In 2014 government politicians consented that the third alignment shall cross the scenic island Egholm and valuable and vulnerable natural areas. The studio locks horns with this contested situation. It relates to a debate about how larger infrastructural projects can perform as more than mono-functional spaces and imagines a bridge structure that enables a series of spaces and functions. The densification of the inner city and the demand for better mobilities in the regional and local scale create the potential for a state-of-the-art project that offers attractive urban environment where public and ecosystem services, culture, mobility and housing are included in long-term sustainable solutions for the city.

This studio is used as a case to discuss how urban design can be a method to tease out essential aspects of a complex large infrastructural project: how it can work as a unique mode to unfold, analyze, manifest and reverberate socio-cultural-political-economic-technical issues. As such the paper targets how urban mobilities design imaginaries can articulate ‘matters of concern’ (Latour 2004).

The paper aims at three methodical reflection points in relation to the agency of urban mobilities design imaginaries: to discuss urban design as a unique mode of analytical inquiry; to initiate learning on such studio work as productive manifestations of collective urban and mobilities ‘matters of concern’; and to point to the potential for imaginaries to facilitate ‘publics’ (Bjögvinsson et al. 2012).