In Latin America, the future of cities is decided by technical forecasting and the market. What is lacking is not imagination, but its distribution. Utopia, understood as infrastructure, names precisely what is unevenly distributed: the capacity to imagine one’s own future and for that imagination to count.
We tend to think of utopia as content. An image of an ideal city, distant, naïve. Thinking of it as infrastructure makes it something else. Not an image, but a capacity. The capacity to produce, sustain, and contest one’s own future visions. And like any infrastructure, it does not reach everyone equally. Some have the means to imagine their future, while others do not. The usual diagnosis is that our cities lack visions, and that these visions would come before the technical act of planning. We believe something else is missing. We do not lack imagination, but the means to produce futures and make them count in public decision-making. To ask about utopia as infrastructure, then, is to ask who has this capacity to anticipate and who does not.
From Theory to Practice: Building Future Infrastructures
Theorizing this from Latin America and putting it into practice through methodological translation turns it into a laboratory: a place where the infrastructure of futures is not only observed but built and put at risk. The Latin American city: unequal, informal, increasingly threatened by the commodification of housing. It is here that the planning of a single future has already visibly failed. Where the problem is laid bare, without anesthetic. Here, infrastructure is precisely the terrain of scarcity, informality, and self-construction. Thinking of the future as infrastructure, and from the South, comes with a warning: anticipating is not only about desire; it is also about foreseeing danger. Imagining situated futures means both hope and alertness. And that alert is therefore a strong signal for the European cities we analyze from this perspective. A planner in Zurich needs it just as much. The financialization of housing and the crisis of technocratic planning are already global. The difference is that in Latin America, the diagnosis came earlier.
On this Basis, we Work Through Three Operations
- Spatializing, which anchors imagination in territory.
- Visualizing, which makes futures legible and open to discussion.
- And futurizing, which gives them depth in time. This simultaneous triad does not fix a single future but keeps the spectrum of possible futures open.
A tension remains that we cannot hide. For situated imagination to reach the institution, it must fit within the formats through which decisions are made. A report, a regulation, a plan, or a diagram. And paradoxically, once it fits into those formats, it loses part of what made it contestable. We then do not resolve utopia. We work within it, precisely to shorten the gap between utopia and reality. That gap is not a void to be closed, and it is an impossible. It is the space of action in which utopia becomes concrete.
Utopialab.ai is the infrastructure from which we write this. An artefact that tests on itself the instruments it proposes for others, adapts when conditions change, and improves the response and decision-making of those planning under uncertainty. Anticipating without utopia is simply managing what already exists. Utopian infrastructure does not promise a better future. It only makes them possible.
Recommendations
- Exhibition: How to Design a Revolution: The Chilean Road to Design, 27 November 2026 (vernissage) | Museum Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt.
- Publication: How to Design a Revolution: The Chilean Road to Design, Lars Müller Publishers.
Isabel Serra Benítez is an urbanist and PhD in American Studies at USACH. She leads utopialab.ai, an anticipatory intelligence infrastructure for cities, working across critical urban studies, anticipatory governance, and futures studies.
Pablo Levine Mardones is an architect and urban planner, and a researcher at the Chair of Prof. Hubert Klumpner at ETH Zurich. Trained at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and ETH Zurich, his work focuses on processes of urban transformation in Latin America and beyond.