This article explores visioning workshops as a participatory tool of urban peacebuilding and planning in post-war Kosovo. Its starting point is that in order to understand what these workshops do (and not) in a post-war urban environment; it is helpful to explore their emplaced history and how this connects to the present use of visioning workshops as a peacebuilding tool. By doing so, and with the help of visioning handbooks and manuals as well as actual workshop reports, the article argues that the way in which visioning workshops have been deployed in post-war Kosovo entails that conceptions of the urban past and the urban future are anthropocentric in character – instantiated only in and through workshop participants’ subjective memories of urban spaces. The visioning workshops thus neglect the significance of war-torn urban materialities in co-constituting urban identities.