Socioplastics 11978 Before a Choice Is Offered
Urban redevelopment often presents choices among futures: a cultural quarter, a commercial waterfront or an ecological corridor. These options arrive after earlier decisions have shaped which futures feel attractive, plausible or sufficiently familiar to merit consideration. DesireOrientation names this pre-choice directionality. It follows how spatial images, investment sequences and repeated encounters distribute the capacity to imagine a future as one’s own. Desire is formed within material settings and public narratives, then enters decision-making through the possibilities people can recognise. Ruth Levitas approaches utopia as a method for critically reconstructing social arrangements. Tom Moylan’s account of critical utopias values narratives that preserve disagreement and unfinished transformation. Their approaches bring different emphases to the study of future images. Together they sharpen a central question: how does a representation open one trajectory while narrowing others? A future image may provide inspiration, organise investment or make some ways of living appear more credible. Its effects depend on how it circulates and on the conditions that support the future it depicts. Imagine two renderings of a former industrial waterfront. One shows cafés, continuous promenades and curated vegetation; another depicts informal repair yards, tidal infrastructure, shared production and seasonal access. Neither image records an accomplished future. Each distributes attention across different forms of labour and occupation. A study could examine who commissioned the images, which activities they foreground, what costs they acknowledge and how their scenarios shape public discussion. This hypothetical comparison illustrates a method rather than describing an actual redevelopment programme. DesireOrientation differs from FantasyControl, which examines representations that acquire premature authority over decisions. Here the focus is the interval between attraction and commitment, when architectural imagery already acts socially while outcomes remain open. The marker helps analyse how plans and images orient anticipation without reducing desire to marketing or treating a collective response as uniform. Critical design can widen the field of imaginable futures by making their conditions visible. The question is how an image relates to the material relations it proposes and whose aspirations gain practical support through it.
REFERENCES
Levitas, R. (2013) Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Moylan, T. (1986) Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. New York: Methuen.
CITE AS
Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics, LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid.
https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/p/socioplastics-project-index.html