Preemption, precaution, preparedness: Anticipatory action and future geographies

2010/04/09 by Ben Anderson · 1 voice · 7 citations
Social Sciences · #Geographies of human-animal interactions #Urban Planning and Governance #Disaster Management and Resilience

paper · doi:10.1177/0309132510362600

openalex publication_date 2010/04/09 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04

Abstract

The paper focuses on how futures are anticipated and acted on in relation to a set of events that are taken to threaten liberal democracies. Across different domains of life the future is now problematized as a disruption, a surprise. This problematization of the future as indeterminate or uncertain has been met with an extraordinary proliferation of anticipatory action. The paper argues that anticipatory action works through the assembling of: styles through which the form of the future is disclosed and related to; practices that render specific futures present; and logics through which anticipatory action is legitimized, guided and enacted.

Citations

• Anticipating fatness: childhood, affect and the pre-emptive âwar on obesityâ
• "Transcending Without Transcendence": Utopianism and an Ethos of Hope
• Enacting catastrophe: preparedness, insurance, budgetary rationalization
• Accumulation by Decarbonization and the Governance of Carbon Offsets
• Becoming and Being Hopeful: Towards a Theory of Affect
• Modernity and Self-Identity

Cited by

• Post-nuclear worldmaking and counter-hegemony: Against catastrophic failures of imagination
• Governing layers of shifting sands: Subterranean hazards, unfolding catastrophes and quotidian fragmentation
• Rage as a Point of Ecotheological Ethics in Times of Crisis
• When AIs become oracles: generative artificial intelligence, anticipatory urban governance, and the future of cities
• Speculative futures: Cities, data, and governance beyond smart urbanism
• Insurance as maladaptation: Resilience and the ‘business as usual’ paradox
• Environmental Geopolitics and Outer Space

Discussions

• Fantàstica parametritizació onto-epistemològica de Ben Anderson doi.org/10.1177/0309... [bsky, 0 points, 1 comments]

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