Whose future is this building for? Storytelling, conflicting futures, and the valuation of existing buildings in urban development

In urban development projects, existing buildings are rarely valued for what they are today. They are valued for what they might become – for the latent futures they make possible and the futures they foreclose. A municipality sees a run-down industrial building as a resource for climate-conscious development. An investor sees the same building as an obstacle to a viable business case. A third investor sees it as an opportunity to tell a story about authenticity, creativity, and urban life. These actors do not disagree about the building. They disagree about the future.
This presentation introduces an idea for a research project that investigates how existing buildings and the futures imagined for them interact as actors in urban development decision-making. Grounded in Dewey's pragmatist theory of valuation – where values are always oriented toward anticipated futures – and informed by actor-network theory and the anthropology of the future, I argue that imagined futures are not merely ideas in stakeholders' minds. They mobilize, they exclude, they create alliances and break them. And existing buildings are actors in the same sense – their materiality, scale, and history shape which futures appear possible and which appear foreclosed.