Temporalities in urban policies

Abstract

This paper examines urban policies from the perspective of temporality as a structuring category in the production and management of urban space. Contrasting with the hegemonic conception of linear time in planning, it proposes understanding it as a sociopolitical construction traversed by heterogeneous rhythms, discontinuities, and power relations. The central hypothesis argues that urban policies operate under multiple temporal regimes, provoking functional rearticulations and frictions that compromise their internal coherence and practical effectiveness. Epistemologically anchored in the critique of urban space-time and complexity theory, the study develops a theoretical-analytical model organized into three dimensions—institutional time, social time, and ecological time—whose interaction configures what is called the zone of temporal conflict. Far from constituting a circumstantial anomaly, this zone is structural to contemporary cities. Its origin lies in the coexistence of dissonant temporalities that, by interacting, condition the cycles of public actions. In this sense, it presents some constitutive traits: the structural asynchrony between temporal regimes; An opacity stemming from difficulties in multiscale coordination and the selective invisibility of the temporalities of vulnerable groups and natural processes; and the dispute over legitimacy in decision-making arenas. The argument developed suggests that interpreting urban policies requires abandoning the search for synchronization and recognizing that temporal plurality is not a dysfunction to be corrected, but a constitutive condition of the urban environment. Moving in this direction implies developing mediation capacities and socio-technical networks capable of building more equitable, and sensitive responses to the complexity of the urban environment.