Temporal concepts in urban and regional planning: Urban narratives, storylines and policy discourses

As a professional field of knowledge, policy and practice, planning has yet to engage with more interpretive, relational, and critical understandings of time (Davoudi, 2012; Jensen et al., 2023). Drawing on interpretive policy analysis and political theory, we examine the rhetorical logic and narrative rationality (Fisher, 1994) of contemporary urban policy grounded in temporal concepts (e.g., 15-minute cities, 20-minute neighbourhoods, 30-minute territories). More specifically, we are interested in developing an understanding of the persuasive power (Healey, 2007) of temporal concepts to (i) frame policy discourses in urban planning and governance strategies and (ii) travel worldwide as best policy practices worth of emulation and adaptation (Harris & Moore, 2013; Healey, 2013) while gaining the adherence of political, professional, and lay audiences (Fisher, 1994). Using short illustrative examples from five cities across three continents, we identify converging storylines underpinning urban policy discourses and practices and examine the tropes of naming and forms of rhetorical persuasion (Finlayson, 2012) legitimising temporal concepts as universal and self-evident carriers of urban sustainability values. In dialogue with critical scholarship on current urban sustainability policy debates (Angelo & Wachsmuth, 2020), we reflect on the caveats and limitations of temporal concepts circulating as ‘replicable’ and ‘adaptable’ urban policy solutions to global sustainability problems (Montero, 2020). In conclusion, we draw attention to embedding situated urban contingencies (Galland et al., 2023) shaped by historical and socio–cultural context (Davoudi et al., 2020) and ‘everyday life’ perspectives (Freudendal-Pedersen, 2022) in temporal urban policy discourses and practices.