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.
