The 'new' Metropolis as a post-political script? Re-reading a vision exercise for a metropolitan region

Abstract

Building on Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) as an allegorical framework, the paper revisits contemporary vision-making processes for metropolitan regions. The Greater Helsinki Vision 2050 is examined as a collective exercise in imagining metropolitan futures, interpreted through the Institutional Analysis and Development framework as an action situation with specific rules, structures, and interactions. The analysis highlights how such vision processes resonate with concepts of soft spaces, pragmatism, and post-political planning, reflecting broader debates about governance and spatial strategy. The study also underlines the continued ambiguity of the metropolis as both a territorial form and a product of political, institutional, and social preferences. By returning to Lang’s metaphor of the “m-machine,” the paper suggests that today’s metropolis still functions as a mediating construct between contrasting interests and rationalities, embodying both the tensions and the hopes embedded in metropolitan futures.