The Cancelled Future: Neoliberal Capitalism and the Urban Crisis of Imagination
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In an era defined by capitalist realism, our collective ability to imagine futures beyond neoliberal frameworks has been profoundly constrained, giving rise to “cancelled futures”. This imaginative paralysis is particularly evident in urban planning, where gentrification has homogenised urban spaces and created displacement. Looking at Montréal, this paper examines how the crises of capitalist realism and urban commodification have reshaped cities, limiting the possibilities for equitable and inclusive futures. I first demonstrate how capitalist realism perpetuates cancelled futures and facilitates the forces of gentrification. I explore how these dynamics have contributed to the transformation of Montréal's urban landscape, prioritising market‐driven development. Second, I turn to memory to argue that the persistence of unrealised pasts can serve as a counterforce to this imaginative stasis. It investigates how memory activism and haunting are mobilised in Montréal to contest the erasures caused by gentrification, allowing residents to reclaim suppressed possibilities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.047 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".