Urban Hypernormalisation. The city as a stage for collective fiction.
In recent times, with growing geopolitical instability, the resurgence of conflicts we thought belonged to the past century, and the intensification of interconnected crises — climatic, democratic, economic, and social — the concept of hypernormalisation has resurfaced in public discourse.
We feel its presence in many aspects of our daily lives, even if we rarely name it consciously. We recognise it in the way we keep working as if everything were under control, while precarity becomes chronic and our rhythms increasingly inhuman. In our relationships, shaped by ambiguity, simulated connection, and a refusal of vulnerability. In the digital image we craft of ourselves, polished and programmed to the point of self-censorship — as if authenticity had become a miscalculation.
And of course, we see it in our cities. Spaces that should embody transformation, yet more and more often simply perform it. Contemporary urbanism is one of the fields where hypernormalisation acts most pervasively and subtly. And yet, we only perceive it up to a point. We sense the fiction, but do not name it. We feel the dissonance, but do not interrupt it.
We live in hypernormalised cities. Spaces designed to reassure, to simulate a normality that no one truly inhabits anymore. Contemporary urbanism, with its smart cities, regenerated waterfronts, and instagrammable benches, presents itself as an orderly response to a chaotic world. But it is precisely this simulated order, this aesthetic of functionality and efficiency, that reveals its ideological nature. A hyperproduced normality, which does not reflect real life, but rather a digestible surrogate of it.
In its original sense, hypernormalisation describes a system where everyone knows something is wrong, yet behaves as if everything is fine — because imagining alternatives has become impossible. In today’s cities, this translates into spaces drained of meaning, where participation is replaced by consultation, inclusion by prepackaged policies, dissent by sustainability festivals. Urbanism becomes spectacle, a simulacrum of transformation: a narrative of change in which real change never happens.
The environmental, social, and housing crises affecting our cities are well known, mapped, and discussed. Yet systemic responses continue to rely on aesthetic, technological, or managerial solutions. It is the urbanism of placebo: it regenerates without redistributing, innovates without disrupting, decorates discomfort instead of questioning it. Spatial inequalities are masked by a vocabulary of “resilience” and “intelligence” that anaesthetises conflict and neutralises every desire for rupture.
Psychologically, hypernormalisation produces a pathological adaptation: we learn to live within distortion as if it were reality, to accept an unlivable city as “the best we can hope for.” We lose the capacity to imagine, to desire, to resist. Marginalised subjectivities — precarious workers, migrants, people with disabilities, youth without inheritance — become urban ghosts: not accounted for in plans, not included in renderings, not contemplated in budgets.
Meanwhile, politics retreats behind technical devices, delegating to governance what was once the terrain of social conflict. But technique alone cannot produce justice. Cities need dysfunctions, fractures, political imagination. Not new hyperfunctional normalities, but spaces where reality disrupts the performance.
Recognising hypernormalisation is the first step toward breaking free from it. It means admitting that the emperor has no clothes, that contemporary cities, as they are currently designed, do not work for those who need them most. It also means rejecting toxic narratives of stability, linear progress, and cosmetic regeneration. If urban transformation is to be real, it must begin with a rupture in the script: exposing the artifice, disarming the fiction, politicising space.
Only then, perhaps, can we begin to imagine cities that are true, not just normalised.
