Un/Doing Future, Unsettling Temporalization

Abstract

The concept of the future, its prognostications and its applications increasingly shapes present social worlds. From government policy to architectural design, from preemptive everyday practices to interventionist counter-cultural projects, imaginations of the future take concrete form and enjoy a powerful purpose. In this intervention we ask: How is the future invented, planned, renounced and researched? Specifically, how do we analyse the entanglement of temporal and spatial logics against the enveloping imperative of 'future as crisis'? What is the role of methodology, collaboration and engagement in shaping debates about the future, and how do we research different futures as well as different positionalities within the future? Rather than taking a prescriptive approach, we consider future epistemologies as well as concrete future practices and the ways in which multiple notions of futurity might overlap. Additionally, we consider the standpoint from which different futures are imagined or renounced, and the ways in which entanglements of past, present and future might reflect a struggle on different social fields. Finally, we complicate some of the distinctions that researchers draw between the practices of imagining, planning and producing future scenarios as exclusionary, and modes of navigating and shaping futures that are embedded in everyday lives.

WHERE IS THE FUTURE? Geography, Expectation and Experience across Three Decades of Malaysia's Vision 2020

“…Boudreau, 2022, this issue) and experiences (or memories of them). In addition, Version 2020 speaks directly to the theme of ‘Un/Doing future’ by showing how retrospection on futures past constitutes a resource for alternative possibility and versions of ‘what could be’ (Chakkalakal and Ren, 2022, this issue).…”

CITY OF REPAIR: Practicing the Future in Mexico City

“…I argue that an epistemology of the street allows us as researchers to read the street to highlight the often invisible methods of futuring. While the epistemology of the street draws from a speculative and materialistic perspective (see Chakkalakal and Ren, 2022, this issue), I presented the futures from the street as sociomaterial figurations that epistemologically diversify our understanding of futuring and help us connect aspiration and anticipation.…”

THE FUTURE SCENARIOS OF CITIES: An Analysis of their Institutional Construction

“…This diversity of imagination is exemplified in the production of urban futures in science fiction and marked by visions of planetary urbanization, conflict between urban utopias and dystopias, and the collision of the built environment and nature. It also brings to the fore the alienation of society by the built environment, the effect of concentrated oppression on human freedom, the transformation of space–time relationships, and the role of infotechnologies and biotechnologies in future scenarios of cities and urban life (Collie, 2011; see also Chakkalakal and Ren on unequal and vulnerable futures, 2022, this issue).…”