A book talk and discussion on Peter Ekman's new book, Timing the Future Metropolis: Foresight, Knowledge, and Doubt in America's Postwar Urbanism (Cornell University Press, 2024). As an intellectual history of planning, urbanism, design, and social science, this book explores the network of postwar institutions, formed amid specters of urban "crisis" and "renewal," that set out to envision the future of the American city. Peter Ekman focuses on one decisive node in the network: the Joint Center for Urban Studies, founded in 1959 by scholars at Harvard and MIT.