Stage performances as means for linking sociotechnical imaginaries and projective genres in the discourse around urban air mobility

AbstractSociotechnical imaginaries play a crucial role in the context of urban air mobility. At the beginning of this article, I present the Pop.Up, commonly described as ‘air taxi’, as one such vision. Taking the analysis of multiple visions as an orientation, I show secondly, how other temporal figures such as projective genres fulfil different functions to establish specific visions as dominant ones. By examining a press release about the Pop.Up, I show how distant futures are constructed trough explicating the problem of congestion in metropolitan cities. With the analysis of the stage performance by stakeholders from Airbus and Italdesign during the Geneva Motor Show 2017, where the Po…