Preempting experiential city futures: The urban pre-tour method

In this article we introduce and demonstrate the urban pre-tour: a novel future oriented ethnographic method for engaging with the possibilities of everyday life in future cities. In doing so we contribute to a growing body of scholarship which seeks to contest dominant top-down urban futures narratives. We argue that to responsibly and ethically engage with city/urban futures it is vital that we account for the sensory, embodied and affective experiences, expertise and futures imaginaries of real people, as they emerge from their embodied and sensory experiences in everyday interspecies, technological, weather and built urban environments. As such we advance established mobile video-based urban tour and go-along methodologies in what we see as a necessary step towards creating and activating new knowledge about possible ground-up city futures through attention to urban experiences, multispecies lives and infrastructures.