‘Future community’ is not an academic concept but one proposed by the state for the grounding of multiple urban strategies. The word ‘future’ is used as an adjective that loosely describes ‘better’, and the term ‘community’ carries a nostalgic image of the collective units before China’s market reform. However, as this concept becomes increasingly prevalent in real estate development, it has also become a handy term for strengthening technocratic urban governance. Thus it is perhaps instructive to reinvestigate the essential meanings and development potentials behind the term. Issue 93 hopes to present critical observations and discussions around the topic through five dimensions – time, space, nature, technology, and organisation – while a series of questions have been raised and re-examined: What are the deep-seated problems in our current communities? What are the fundamental criteria of future communities? What methods could be introduced into future community practices? This issue also incorporates insights from anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, and other fields apart from architecture and urban planning to broaden our scope into the subject.