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

Abstract

In 1991, the Malaysian Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohamad, announced Vision 2020 to make the country 'fully developed' by that year. Launched during a period of rapid economic growth, Vision 2020 legitimized Mahathir's developmental penchant for spectacular urban megaprojects and ambitious technological experimentation. While hopes of reaching Vision 2020's crude GDP targets were dashed even before the end of the 1990s (largely as a result of the Asian financial crisis), and Mahathir stepped down from office in 2003, the year 2020 retained significance as a horizon of expectation for a generation of Malaysians. In this Interventions essay I look back at three decades of Vision 2020 from the temporal vantage point of 2020. The lead-up to that year saw political, popular and artistic retrospection on Vision 2020, spurred in part by nonagenarian Mahathir's return to power. Contextually, 'Where is the future?' articulates unrealized technological and developmental expectations from peak Vision 2020. Conceptually, the essay offers a critical geography of political futures past--demonstrating the constitutive spatiality of future expectations and the diverse ways in which elite developmental visions are engaged in life geographies, spaces of experience and representational practices.

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

“…While it is important to consider the advantages of future thinking to visualize different alternatives to mega‐trends that can eventually potentiate transformative innovations (Sharpe, 2020), a city's institutionalization of future visions can also reinforce path‐dependence trajectories towards certain kinds of futures. Malaysia's Vision 2020 described by Bunnell (2022, this issue) and the ‘making of Groy’ by Hilbrandt and Grafe (2022, this issue) provide good examples of the institutionalization of hegemonic and globalized futures.…”

Points of persuasion: Truth spots in future city development

“…On the one hand, Putrajaya followed prior state-sponsored development projects that were “in line with Vision 2020” – Mahathir’s understanding of what it would mean to be a “fully developed country” by that year – in being located within Malaysia’s main metropolitan region, around (but also extending well beyond) KL. In addition, the federal territory of KL city proper was the skyscraping urban centre and existing leading edge of Vision 2020-oriented national infrastructural development and experimentation (Bunnell, 2022). Malaysian professionals, firms and institutions that had been involved in prior large-scale urban developments in KL were commissioned to deploy that experience in Putrajaya as a showcase of Malaysian city-building know-how.…”

Un/Doing Future, Unsettling Temporalization

“…We expand Arjun Appadurai's position that the capacity to aspire is distributed in an unequal manner by contending that the logics and narratives of future making as well as the institutionalized tools of scaling and measuring futurity (see González‐Arellano's ‘The future scenarios of cities’, 2022, this issue) themselves create different social positionalities (see Naruka's ‘Future of a dying river’, 2022, this issue). Aspects of uncertainty, of risk and vulnerability, but also the politicized calculations of probability and speculation (see Hilbrandt and Grafe's ‘The urban visions of global climate finance’ and Bunnell's ‘Where is the future?’, 2022, this issue) need to be analysed from a differentiated but also a multitemporal perspective that captures the figurative interplay between various social fields and positionalities. It is important to stress that by reconsidering the everyday, we also bring to light unexpected agencies, navigational capacities and resistances.…”

“…The ‘retrofuturism’ in Tim Bunnell's essay ‘Where is the future? Geography, expectation and experience across three decades of Malaysia's Vision 2020’ (2022, this issue) operates on multiple fronts: the researcher revisits his own research from the past to draw implications for a new time; the research is about a vision for the future from the past and the political figure at the centre of the past re‐emerging in the present. Thus the future does not fit into a linear or singular logic, nor was it envisioned or researched as such.…”