On 21 March 2025, SCAS hosted the 7th Wittrock Lecture, warmly welcoming back Professor Ash Amin, Emeritus 1931 Chair of Geography at the University of Cambridge and former SCAS Fellow, as this year’s distinguished speaker. His lecture, titled Future Foreclosed: Urban Time and the Politics of Urban Incipience, offered a compelling exploration of how urban futures are subtly shaped—and often constrained—by overlapping and conflicting temporalities.

The Wittrock Lecture Series annually invites leading international scholars to reflect on themes central to the Collegium’s mission. Amin’s contribution exemplified this spirit, addressing the politics of urban change in an era marked by crisis, displacement, and inequality.

Framing the city as a palimpsest—layered with memories, histories, and lived experiences—Amin drew on thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben and John Berger to introduce the concept of “urban incipience.” These are the quiet beginnings of alternative futures that emerge not through grand designs or formal planning, but through everyday acts of care, repair, and survival in marginalized urban spaces.

He contrasted this with a “futurity of foreclosure”: a closing-off of possibilities driven by forces of securitization, redevelopment, and exclusion. Yet, even within these abandoned or overlooked parts of the city, he argued, we may find the seeds of different futures—shaped by resilience, relationships, and creative persistence.

The 2025 Wittrock Lecture added a thought-provoking dimension to ongoing conversations at SCAS about the role of scholarship in addressing contemporary societal challenges. In returning to the Collegium, Ash Amin offered a lecture that was both critical and quietly hopeful—illuminating the tensions of the present and the fragile emergence of more humane urban worlds.

The lecture was followed by a panel discussion on the topic Futuring Urban Lives: Foreclosures, Openings, and Contestations.

Read more about the event here.

Text by Ellen Werner