This paper endeavors to articulate an inherent tension animating discourse about the future. Following socio-legal theorist Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, it is suggested that future-making as discursive activity contains both ‘an inscription of anticipation and an anticipated inscription’, in the sense that it oscillates between the disclosure of unpredictable imaginative spaces – on the one hand – and the enclosure in claustrophobic narrations motivated from past experience – on the other. In light of this, the paper attempts to excavate this ambiguity of future-oriented talk, by leveraging findings from qualitative fieldwork carried out in 2011 through a mix of archival research and interviews, in relation to discourse about the future of the city of Turin (Italy), in anticipation of carmaker Fiat’s move of its headquarters away from Turin: an eventuality that actually materialized following the company’s January 2014 merger with Chrysler
