For a brief moment, the intersecting disasters of the ongoing past – the COVID-19 pandemic, climate events (fires, floods and hurricanes), as well as the uprisings against white supremacy and coloniality in the United States and Europe destabilized the temporal boundaries between the past, present, and future. Amidst the disorientations produced by their collapse into each other, movements for racial justice drew attention to the histories of urban planning that progressively exposed black and brown communities to the disproportionate harms of the pandemic and police violence, and demanded justice and investment to respond to these compound crises (Taylor, 2020). Yet, if the events of the last three years revealed the violences of modern planning, they also provided the grounds for its reinscription. Large infrastructure projects and real estate redevelopments have resumed after the pandemic and climate events, producing new interventions to respond to the problematic effects of older ones. Like all good development projects, planning endures with and after critique (Ferguson, 1994).

This special issue examines the worlds that are brought into being after plans are made and differentially conjured into being; after its critiques of modernist simplification and transposability have been read, recognized and incorporated by planners in their practice (Scott, 1998). In the papers that follow, we focus on the temporal dimensions of urban planning. We are particularly interested in the uneven ways in which urban spaces in the present – as (always incomplete) materializations of modernist plans past – present new predicaments not just for social life, but for the craft of planning itself. What is left for planning to do after planners recognize their projects will not materialize as designed, that complexity and context are requisite features of their materialization, and the legacies of racist and xenophobic planning initiatives continue to structure the environment in which they work? How might planners work to stabilize a future amidst lively and vital debris of past plans? Simply put, what and how do planners do now that the worlds they (partly) designed into being are falling apart? How do they incorporate and address not just scholarly critiques (for example, the ways in which they evacuate complexity and contexts) in planning processes, but also the falling apart social and natural worlds that plans have contributed to bringing into being? In this special issue, we show how planners and subject populations wield diverse temporalities to generate their authority; how they make worlds in the aftermath of modernist planning.

In this issue, the articles by Jenny Lindblad and Alize Arican show how planners, politicians and workers alike wrestle with their agency in the wide time spaces between the plan’s intentions and its becoming. Jennifer Mack shows how planners respond to the “hereafters” of modernist planning; how they spatialize race and respond to critiques of producing dangerous, non-white spaces. Finally, as urban plans configure infrastructures to waste the sea, Nikhil Anand’s paper shows how life that emerges in the waste ecologies of the Anthroposea evade any simple categorizations of nature and culture, or pollution and nutrients. These dynamic processes evacuate the stable near futures upon which the work of ecological restoration and urban planning depend.