Reclaiming Disruption: Pathways to Hopeful Urban Futures

Fenna Imara Hoefsloot, Oksana Zaporozhets, Annegret Haase, Valeria Lazarenko and Moritz Kasper
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Fenna Imara Hoefsloot: Department of Geography, University College London, UK
Oksana Zaporozhets: Georg Simmel Center for Urban Studies, Humboldt University Berlin, Germany / Institute for Regional Geography (IfL), Germany
Annegret Haase: Department of Urban and Environmental Sociology, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), Germany
Valeria Lazarenko: Georg Simmel Center for Urban Studies, Humboldt University Berlin, Germany / University of Hamburg, Germany
Moritz Kasper: German Environment Agency (UBA), Germany

Urban Planning, 2026, vol. 11

Abstract: Disruptions increasingly constitute urban futures by interrupting established trajectories and influencing how cities are imagined, planned, and realised. This article challenges the prevailing assumption that urban disruption merely produces social fragmentation and catastrophic futures, positioning it instead as a catalyst for progressive urban transformation. Although disruption is widely discussed across politics, management, technology, and infrastructure, these discussions remain compartmentalised. Rather than adopting sector‐specific perspectives, we propose an urban‐centred framework to understand how disruptions converge and manifest within cities. The article examines how disruption functions to destabilise established thought patterns, revealing how the city operates and how urban actors might think and do the city differently. Drawing on diverse examples, this conceptual intervention highlights disruption’s capacity to create openings for innovation, creativity, and transformative change while acknowledging its potential for ambivalent outcomes. By revisiting existing scholarship on disruption, we argue for studying disruption in relation to the transformations it produces in agency, power relations, imaginaries, and future‐making. The potential of disruption to elevate marginalised voices, expand epistemic resources, and foster collective action toward better urban futures is examined. Disruption is thus reclaimed as a political and creative force—one that reorients urban research from diagnosing fragmentation toward exploring pathways for hopeful, collective, and democratic urban futures amid and through disruption.

Keywords: agency; collective; disruption; fragmentation; hopeful urban futures; urban future‐making (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cog:urbpla:v11:y:2026:a:11708

DOI: 10.17645/up.11708

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