Platform Urbanism, Creativity, and the New Educational Futurism

This essay examines speculative narratives reflective of Silicon Valley and corporate technology culture that project creative scenarios and sociotechnical futures for cities and citizens, whereby learning and creativity become global imperatives to defer future risk within a new digital urbanism. Taking inspiration from Fredric Jameson's transhistorical dialectics, Alexander J. Means assembles a cognitive map of emerging sociotechnical projections of urbanity and education through three frames - solutionism, collaborationism, and techno-realism - linking each to specific conceptualizations of creativity and learning. Means argues that these projections are subsumed within an ontology of the present, and they therefore fail to index the complexities that drive historical and technological change, particularly the deep structure of power and conflict immanent to late capitalism as a world-historical system. Such an ontology is ultimately rooted in imaginative displacement, a futurism without futurity, where time is rendered a static feedback loop of present systems and processes.