A while ago I was thinking about what looked like a change of attention amongst Singapore’s planners and developers away from the horizontal and towards the vertical:

Singapore definitely seems taller. But lots more of it seems to be underground as well. There are new connectors between Wheelock Place and Orchard MRT, a new subway between City Mall and Suntec, three new floors of shops below ground in Ion mall. Rather than reclaiming land horizontally, from the sea, and eventually from Indonesia and Malayasia, Singapore seems to be reclaiming it vertically. No new territory, as far as the map is concerned: instead, they’re using engineering to overcome the physical resistances of densely-packed earth and thin, unsupportive air to fit more people (and businesses, and advertising) in the area they already have, in the same way that engineering and ambition enabled them to reclaim vast areas of land from the sea. It must be easier than facing the political resistances that limit horizontal expansion. Or perhaps it’s a way of overcoming them: tunnels between malls in Johor Bahru and Woodlands must surely already be on a planner’s laptop somewhere.

I just came across the Economic Strategy Committee’s report, published on the 30th January 2010, a month before my speculation on the change of axis. About three-quarters of the way through, there’s this recommendation from the committee:

Adopt a long term perspective and invest ahead to create new land and space. While we can expand our land mass through reclamation as we have done for Marina Bay, there will be limits in the long-run. In the next 10 years, the government should seek to catalyse the development of underground space as a means to intensify land use. We should put in place enablers for underground development such as by developing a subterranean land rights and valuation framework, and by establishing a national geology office. We must also develop an underground masterplan to ensure that underground and aboveground spaces are synergised, and invest in the creation of basement spaces in conjunction with new underground infrastructural projects (e.g. rail), so as to add to our “land bank”.

Subterranean land rights and valuation framework, and an underground masterplan. Making sure above and below are lined up. And adding to a store by creating more empty spaces. As usual, Singapore is a few steps ahead of my imagination.

This is a first go at summarising something I’ve become a lot more interested in recently: how to talk about place in accounts of the future. It’s a draft, not polished, but it’s here because I want to talk about practical ways of exploring these located futures, and I want the rationale up somewhere first. Later this year I’ll be talking about these ideas at the World Futures Studies Conference in Penang.

Considering the future is widely reckoned to be a useful and productive undertaking, giving groups and individuals confidence in the decisions they take in the present, informing their goals and aspirations and helping them to try to anticipate and respond to change, with some authors calling for a greater recognition of the value of learners engaging with accounts of the future within current curricula (Facer & Sandford, 2010; Slaughter, 2008; Damasio, 2003; Hicks, 2002). There are a number of different approaches towards engaging with the future employed by different sectors – policymakers, corporate strategists, social science researchers, product designers – but they share a common desire to consider the future as open, a need to offer compelling stories of future events or behaviours, and, usually, an obligation to provide an appropriate level of evidence in support of these stories. In many cases, this need for robust accounts of the future capable of engendering confidence in their utility leads to the use of quasi-scientific language and methodologies, borrowing ways of describing and valuing the world from domains that are trusted to talk about future events, such as engineering or economics.

Adam and Groves (2007) describe the social imperatives that lead to this “scientific” approach towards producing accounts of the future, and suggests that they arise from a dominant ideological perspective that encourages us to consider the future as open, unclaimed and susceptible to colonisation: by constructing futures as immaterial and “extraterrestrial”, elites are free to operate without considering the material consequences of their actions. Introducing Bauman’s (1998) description of “the great war of independence from space”, they note that accountability and responsibility are notions that are strongly coupled to territory, and by projecting their actions into a placeless and abstract domain, these elites are able to evade their legal and moral obligations to communities experiencing the consequences of those actions. Castells (2009) describes a similar state of affairs in discussing the “mythical future time” mobilised by corporate planners, and the way in which their work projects the present-day values of the powerful into the future. In both these descriptions, what leaves the future open to colonisation is the way in which it is represented as abstract, immaterial, placeless, remote, general and unconnected to the present we experience and inhabit. This representation of the future positions it as a resource to be exploited, rather than the dwelling of real people to whom we owe the same moral obligation as those existing now (Groves, 2007).

If it is the remoteness and abstraction of futures as commonly represented that works to obstruct positive social action, then, there is a need to discover a way of constructing possible futures that allows people to connect to real, actual places and people. By accepting the immaterial and de-spatialised futures of powerful elites, we abdicate the right to act in our interests and abandon our future lives to those who have different interests to our own. We need a way of representing futures as connected, placed, real, local and enmeshed within networks of being in order to resist these forces.

Drawing on authors in the ecological tradition (e.g., Berry, 1977; Leopold, 1966), who have drawn attention to the need for societies to recognise the value of place and the ways in which elements of ecological systems – including human beings – are interconnected and interdependent, and on writers in the field of education futures (particularly Slaughter, 2004 and Hicks, 2002), this paper develops the notion of ‘located futures’ as just such a way of representing futures.

Located futures are accounts of alternative futures articulated in relation to a particular place: more broadly, they are futures that have been constructed with a sensitivity to the rootedness and located nature of lived experience. Futures are inescapably located – they happen in some place. By paying attention to what might come to pass in a particular location, it becomes possible to recognise the difference between this and the futures that happen elsewhere, offering an opportunity to counter the general and homogenous quality of the dominant futures constructed on behalf of and in the interests of corporate entities, and connecting those who currently inhabit that place with those who are yet to do so.

Subsequent work will describe the notion and derivation of ‘located futures’ in relation to the domain of education, explore the ways in which they might extend our capacity for embedding futures thinking within learning, and consider some practical applications within a learning context.

Happy Christmas! 2010 was a bit of a rollercoaster: it’s brilliant to end up here, blinking and looking around, to discover that I’ve moved to Singapore, got married and landed a new job somewhere fantastic (more on that next year). And I’m expecting to become a father in a few weeks’ time. That’ll do.

More here in 2011. I can hear mince pies and sherry calling – have a lovely break, if you’re having one, and very best wishes for the New Year.

From The Story of the Amulet, which I was re-reading after coming across Gore Vidal’s 1964 article on Edith Nesbit, children’s author and member of the Fabian society: the children have travelled into a socialist future, when their own age is described as the “dark ages”, and find a boy alone, crying:

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I’m expelled from school,’ said the boy between his sobs.

This was serious. People are not expelled for light offences.

‘Do you mind telling us what you’d done?’

‘I–I tore up a sheet of paper and threw it about in the playground,’ said the child, in the tone of one confessing an unutterable baseness. ‘You won’t talk to me any more now you know that,’ he added without looking up.

‘Was that all?’ asked Anthea.

‘It’s about enough,’ said the child; ‘and I’m expelled for the whole day!’

‘I don’t quite understand,’ said Anthea, gently. The boy lifted his face, rolled over, and sat up.

‘Why, whoever on earth are you?’ he said.

‘We’re strangers from a far country,’ said Anthea. ‘In our country it’s not a crime to leave a bit of paper about.’

‘It is here,’ said the child. ‘If grown-ups do it they’re fined. When we do it we’re expelled for the whole day.’

‘Well, but,’ said Robert, ‘that just means a day’s holiday.’

‘You MUST come from a long way off,’ said the little boy. ‘A holiday’s when you all have play and treats and jolliness, all of you together. On your expelled days no one’ll speak to you. Everyone sees you’re an Expelleder or you’d be in school.’

‘Suppose you were ill?’

‘Nobody is — hardly. If they are, of course they wear the badge, and everyone is kind to you. I know a boy that stole his sister’s illness badge and wore it when he was expelled for a day. HE got expelled for a week for that. It must be awful not to go to school for a week.’

‘Do you LIKE school, then?’ asked Robert incredulously.

‘Of course I do. It’s the loveliest place there is. I chose railways for my special subject this year, there are such splendid models and things, and now I shall be all behind because of that torn-up paper.’

‘You choose your own subject?’ asked Cyril.

‘Yes, of course. Where DID you come from? Don’t you know ANYTHING?’

‘No,’ said Jane definitely; ‘so you’d better tell us.’

‘Well, on Midsummer Day school breaks up and everything’s decorated with flowers, and you choose your special subject for next year. Of course you have to stick to it for a year at least. Then there are all your other subjects, of course, reading, and painting, and the rules of Citizenship.’

‘Good gracious!’ said Anthea.

‘Look here,’ said the child, jumping up, ‘it’s nearly four. The expelledness only lasts till then. Come home with me. Mother will tell you all about everything.’

‘Will your mother like you taking home strange children?’ asked Anthea.

‘I don’t understand,’ said the child, settling his leather belt over his honey-coloured smock and stepping out with hard little bare feet. ‘Come on.’

So they went.

The boy is named after Wells, “the great reformer”, who lived in the dark ages and argued for progress: their own age, with its sharp corners and infant deaths, so appalls their adult host that she is bodily evicted back to her own time, “where London is clean and beautiful, and the Thames runs clear and bright, and the green trees grow, and no one is afraid, or anxious, or in a hurry”.

When I read the book as a child, I remember noticing the way this section stood apart from the historic sections. The hint of back-to-nature romanticism of the boy’s bare feet sat oddly with the talk of Utopian future to someone raised on shiny metal futures, and the worthy nature of the “Citizenship” poetry seemed offputting. But I remember feeling very proud that someone thought enough of us to say a room in each house fit for a child’s needs was a basic necessity.

I’m talking with Andy King, from the soon-to-be-opened Museum of Bristol, this Saturday at the Arnolfini. We’re going to be “In Conversation” as part of their Futurology programme, and I think it should be really interesting. I hope so, anyway, as it’s a public event.

I mailed Andy with some thoughts about what we could talk about, and I’m going to put them here as well, in case we don’t get round to them: I think some of them are things I’d like to follow up.

So, I’ve been thinking about what history and futures studies have in common, and what makes them different, and it seems to me that in each case there’s a kind of common-sense assumption about the discipline (if that’s not too grand a word for futures studies) and the way it works that might not be how it seems to those who try and practise it.

For example, a common-sense view of history might be: things actually happened a certain way in the past, and the historian’s job is to find out what that was as accurately as possible. But actually, my sense is that historians are very finely attuned to the idea that there as many pasts as there are historians, and each age’s view of what happened before it says as much about the dominant ideas of the time as it says about previous events.

Similarly, a common-sense view of the practice of looking at the future might hold that things will turn out a certain way and no other, and that if we know enough about present circumstances we can say confidently what that might be. But actually, most respectable futures practitioners would say that dominant ideas about the what the future might be say more about the attitudes and assumptions of the age in which they emerged than about the way things might be in the future, and that it’s more useful to consider a range of possible alternative futures.

So there’s something both have in common, perhaps – trying to counter dominant popular ideas about what each discipline is for – and a difference – futures studies might focus more on examining alternatives.

Or perhaps another talking point could be around the way time is represented in each. I don’t know very much about how historians discuss the representation of time, but from the perspective of someone trying to talk usefully about the future it’s been fascinating to see the ways different models of how time works shape conversations about the future (sometimes ‘the future’ is waiting for us, presumably having started at the other end of time’s arrow and travelled backwards to meet us; at others, it never arrives, being perpetually deferred to be invoked as a call to action in the present).

Ethics might be another interesting area of discussion: how far ought we, as people who talk about people who for various reasons are not with us at the present moment, whether because they’re dead or not yet born, to extend the respect we show living people to people of the past or the future? If rights to privacy, respect, understanding and so on are universal, shouldn’t they be extended through time? But is there a difference in the degree to which they’re entitled to such rights between people who have lived and people have yet to live?

Another useful area to think about might be to consider what each discipline offers to society: what use is it to talk about the past or the future? Are there different arguments for each, or are there general arguments to do with enlarging our understanding of the way in which people and societies work that support both?

We could move from that into thinking about the ways each act as a force of authority within society: the weight carried by ‘tradition’, the effect of ‘government forecasts’, the self-fulfilling prophecies of science-fiction and the ways historical dramas rewrite and refine national identities.

There’s maybe something to be said about the balance between detail and timescale, the ways in which it’s harder perhaps to be detailed the further one moves from the present (until you get far enough away to say what you like). Or a discussion about the way each generation thinks it’s the first to have ever lived in the present (those beforehand must have known they lived in history, and the ones after us must surely know that they live in the future). Or maybe just a recognition that both of them are attempts to answer questions that lie at the heart of trying to understand our place in the world: asking “what happened? What will happen?” is a fundamentally human thing to do.

Let me know how appealing any of these conversations are, or what alternatives we could consider. We could do worse, I suppose, by just telling each other what we do all day. I’d love to know more about your
work.

So there we are – that’s what we’ll talking about, I hope, for a couple of hours on Saturday afternoon. Come along!