Abstract

In an era of accelerated urban development driven by future orientation—what does incompletion do and what are its social effects? Based on ethnographic work in Lobito, Zurich and Delhi, we push back against what we call here the ‘tyranny of completion’ both analytically and methodologically, by showing how incompletion emerges as a mode of anticipatory future-making. We focus on incompletion as a constitutive element of speculative urbanism, on the authoritarian efforts to eliminate it from the urban fabric, and on how it creates space for experimentation with form and structure. We posit that attending to incompletion allows us to closely observe futures beyond those conceived by the techno-managerial class that initiates speculation. Furthermore, a focus on incompletion enables us to resist the colonizing ambitions of projects that seek to foreclose the future. Moreover, incompletion offers experimental spaces, allowing marginalized and subaltern actors to animate an urban otherwise. With this analytical gesture, the materially incomplete becomes a space of possibilities and care in an era of geopolitical uncertainty. It is one that forges social positionalities and vernacular relations that defy the financial and authoritarian logics of futurity, all the while keeping an orientation towards alternative futurities.

Bathla, N., Schubert, J., & Stallone, S. (2026). Thinking through material incompletion. City, 1–17.