In September 2024, we hosted a conference at Churchill College, Cambridge on 'When planners get it wrong: Failed prediction in post-war urban, social, and development policy’.

Following the Second World War, urban and social planners envisaged urban development plans based on predictions of continuing high rates of population growth, increased home and automobile ownership, and suburban expansion away from crowded inner cities. By the 1970s and 80s, economic crisis, low growth rates, and the end of the post-war baby boom revealed that the vision of continuous expansion that had underpinned post-war urban planning had been mistaken.

The conference explored how post-war planning – in both urban and other areas of social and development policy – was rooted in often erroneous or misguided predictions. Uniting historians and literary scholars, the conference generated a fertile dialogue on the role of prediction in urban planning, science fiction and economic projections in national and international contexts.

It brought together scholars from Italy, UK, Sweden, Australia, The Netherlands and the United States to engage in a conversation on the history of predictions and their failure.