Guiding in the City of Tomorrow: Materializing the Future Through Future and Present Components

This paper explores an intrinsic case of a guided tour of a future city: Stockholm Royal Seaport. Whereas guided city tours usually aim at educating and enlightening those guided about the past and present of the place visited - building the truth claim by relating what is said in the tour to the physical environment of the tour - the case described in this paper offers the opportunity to explore how the urban future is made material to those guided. The study shows that the guide's actions materialized the urban future in two ways: by using future components of the future and by using present components of the future. Based on this analysis, we conclude that both these ways function as ways of confirming the present.