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Speculative Futures of Global South Infrastructures

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Urban Infrastructuring

Part of the book series: Sustainable Development Goals Series ((SDGS))

Abstract

This chapter presents infrastructural issues from select Future Fictions within contemporary transmedial Futurisms from the Global South. It specifically highlights infrastructures in the context of imagined future urban spaces (inhabited primarily, if not exclusively, by human populations) and focuses on their functionality, including sociopolitical systems and systems of governance. It presents four different infrastructures that make up the composition of this speculative future urban: recycling and waste management infrastructures, energy infrastructures, health infrastructures, and food infrastructures. These infrastructures connect to different planetary challenges, including climate change, demographic change, and technological change, and are entangled with questions of sustainability. By taking a relatively expansive survey approach, the chapter explores how such Global South narratives can be studied by enunciating a difference between three overlapping but distinct worldbuilding design toolkits: science fiction (as genre toolkit), architecture fiction (as a prototyping toolkit), and future fiction (as a speculative toolkit).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    FF is an older term from the pulp era of SF. However, its conceptual framework discussed here is closer in principle to Nature’s Futures, Intel’s Tomorrow Project, MIT and Technology Review’s Twelve Tomorrows, and other such ventures that emphasize near-future human concerns.

  2. 2.

    AF is Bruce Sterling’s coinage (2006) discussing the work of J. G. Ballard, developed further by Kazys Varnelis. See Varnelis (2011)—the conceptual framework discussed here also resembles what Brian David Johnston identifies as “Prototype Fiction”.

  3. 3.

    The mundane movement developed in the context of Geoff Ryman’s “Mundane Manifesto” in 2004 and further developed in the context of Afrofuturism by Martine Syms (2013).

  4. 4.

    These new futurisms include, for instance, Afro and Africanfuturism(s), Indigenous Futurism(s), Latinxfuturism(s), Indofuturisms, Desifuturisms, Asianfuturisms, Gulf- and Arabfuturisms, Ricepunk, Silkpunk, etc. While I do not discuss definitions for these futurisms here, some of their connective definitional tissues are listed in different sections below. Furthermore, as Global South (GS) is a highly contested term, some of its critical shortfalls in terms of scope also impact these new futurisms. For instance, many of these futurisms are produced by creatives from or based in the Global North (GN), just as some of the central frameworks dealing with GS concerns have also emerged in the GN. For instance, the systemic infrastructural concerns and general disadvantaged conditions of indigenous or person of colour (POC) communities in the GN that are some of the principal producers of contemporary futurisms are often quite similar to the systemic infrastructural concerns of the GS. The “GS” in connection to these new futurisms thus often becomes a marker of systemic and infrastructural non-privilege regularly eliding geopolitical borders and boundaries. In this text, however, I focus on the GS specifically in terms of geographical distribution.

  5. 5.

    Cf. Johnson, Brian David. Science Fiction Prototyping: Designing the Future with Science Fiction. Morgan & Claypool, 2011.

  6. 6.

    This is the ethos of the Speculative Futures and Speculative design movement. See Dunne and Raby (2013).

  7. 7.

    There are also similar futurisms that have emerged in other infrastructurally poorer regions that might be identified as the “Global East” such as from Eastern Europe. All these other futurisms, which one may call peripheral futurisms, need to be understood within a shared process of future-making that recognizes local problems and variances in terms of their connections to global challenges and responses. For a recent Global East theorization, see Martin Müller (2020). For an infrastructurally inflected analysis that thinks between the GN and South in terms of medical infrastructures, see Banerjee and Castillo (2020). It is also important to note that in certain classifications four Eastern European countries (Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, and Ukraine) fall under the GS category.

  8. 8.

    The “Co” here stands for Complex, Coeval, Compossible. For a brief description of the term and its implications, see Chattopadhyay (2020).

  9. 9.

    There is thus the felt political necessity to group marginalised futurisms as “Alternative Futurisms” as a means to find alternative strategies of sharing worlds and futures from marginalised perspectives. This grouping also resists co-option in frameworks such as SF or global SF.

  10. 10.

    I borrow this term from Adrienne Maree Brown, whose Afrofuturism-inflected strategy can help reconceptualise possible futures from an anti- and decolonial perspective. See Brown (2017).

  11. 11.

    An example of such work is Yudhanjaya Wijeratne et al. (2019). Perhaps unsurprisingly, Wijeratne, who is Sri Lankan, is also an accomplished SF writer.

  12. 12.

    The number of GN FF dealing with migration-related demographic changes, usually dystopian works, have skyrocketed in the recent years.

  13. 13.

    The principal model for the GN imaginary of technological change is cyberpunk and its corporatised dystopia.

  14. 14.

    A leading thinker for such a model is Arturo Escobar, whose work engages specifically with post-development design futures in the Latin American context. However, the movement is quite varied with adherents in different parts of the GS (e.g. Escobar 2018, 2020). These perspectives often bring up indigenous concerns about land and resource use alongside a general resistance to the narrative of continuous development . One can also refer to the Degrowth response to the ecomodernist manifesto in this context (Caradonna et al. 2015).

  15. 15.

    These can include more niche works such as the Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón’s adaptation of P. D. James’ (2006) “Children of Men”, or mainstream SF such as the South African director Neill Blomkamp’s (2013) “Elysium”, or even the innumerable young adult films such as the Maze Runner series or the Hunger Games series.

  16. 16.

    For an excellent analysis of biotechnology and Indian SF, including in Menon’s novel, see Suparno Banerjee (2015).

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Acknowledgements

This chapter is part of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 852190). Portions of the research have also been supported by a grant for the artistic research project “Speculation: Desert” by the Institute for Research within Contemporary Art (FORART).

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  1. University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay

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  1. Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay
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Correspondence to Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay .

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  1. University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

    Deljana Iossifova

  2. University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

    Alexandros Gasparatos

  3. University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

    Stylianos Zavos

  4. University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

    Yahya Gamal

  5. University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

    Yin Long

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Chattopadhyay, B. (2022). Speculative Futures of Global South Infrastructures. In: Iossifova, D., Gasparatos, A., Zavos, S., Gamal, Y., Long, Y. (eds) Urban Infrastructuring. Sustainable Development Goals Series. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-8352-7_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-8352-7_18

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-16-8351-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-16-8352-7

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