Ton Matton is a city planner, indie urbanist, self-confessed fan of performative urbanism, doubter, and epistolarian. At the start of his career as a city planner, Matton began writing letters on the subject of sustainable urban planning, which at the time was still a very new field in the discipline. He wrote one to a government minister, explaining that housing estates are a compromise, not a replacement for life in the city or the countryside. He wrote another one to a Chancellor of Germany, reminding her that the energy generated by solar and wind power still needs to be stored in electric toothbrushes and cell phone batteries. Since then, he has written many more letters—to politicians, project developers, and people of greater and lesser renown. All Matton’s letters express his passionate enjoyment of doubt. With a lot of humor and his usual provocativeness, he challenges the recipients of his letters to look at things in a new light, and in doing so encourages readers to seize the initiative themselves.
