Strong stories or visions of the future stick around. The 1920s sci-fi fantasy of a jetpack commute still pops up in discussions about the future of technology, not to mention as an option on the Citymapper travel app. By co-opting or creating new visions of the future, it seems possible to influence the development of new products and services - from consumer tech to urban infrastructure. A new generation of African artists is taking over the mantle of Afrofuturist arts from a US-centred crowd. They could bring a welcome change to how technology is developed in the region, as well as a challenge to the dominance of imported plans for urban development.

Last Thursday’s London gig from Fantasma was sweaty and boisterous. It was also very different from the remix of Joy Division’s She’s Lost Control that brought front man Spoek Mathambo to the attention of a global audience a couple of years ago. Fantasma is a group of South African musicians with different backgrounds. Guitarist Bhekisenzo Cele started the gig with three of his own songs, introducing the traditional Zulu maskandi music that they went on to mix with shangaan electro, hiphop, punk, electronica and everything in between.

The gig had a buzz about it. But the performance was from a new collective trying things out; it wasn’t as genre-smashing as expected. And expectations ride high for Spoek. In 2011, he titled a collection from his back catalogue ‘Beyond Afrofuturism’. He took on, at least in name, a whole Afro-American cultural movement: embodied by musicians like Sun Ra, George Clinton and Drexciya. A previous post on this blog by Chardine Taylor-Stone describes the roots of Afrofuturism in science fiction that centres on space travel and human enhancement. But she goes on to say: “Afrofuturism also goes beyond spaceships, androids and aliens, and encompasses African mythology and cosmology with an aim to connect those from across the Black Diaspora to their forgotten African ancestry.” Spoek shares what he calls a cultural lineage with this movement. But he is not Afro-American. He also shares a cultural lineage with the sounds of South African musicians he grew up listening to.

This heritage puts a lot of weight on Spoek’s shoulders. He is challenging what Emma Dabiri has called ”a space for black people to write ourselves into speculative pasts and futures, to reimagine our identities beyond and before human history and form”. He is bringing the surreal reimagining of 20th Century technology up against very real local musical cultures with well-defined identities. In his documentary, Future Sounds of Mzansi, Spoek explores the past and future of the role of electronic music in South African popular culture. There is a burgeoning scene with new local genres and dance trends taking off all the time.

There is an opportunity in this connection with South African daily life. George Clinton’s Afrofuturism provided identity and history where it was missing. As South African digital artist and theorist Tegan Bristow puts it: “Afrofuturism is a critical engagement with technology and the power ideals of ‘the other’.” There are contemporary projects that continue to do this beautifully: Cristina de Middel’s Afronaut photograph series reimagines the 1964 Zambian space programme. But Fantasma could mark the beginning of a movement that not just dreams about alternative kinds of technology, but makes it happen.

Technology by the people, for the people

Other forms of art are taking an increasingly activist role in the future of technology. Lydia Nicholas’s description of the relationship between Douglas Adam’s fictional Hitchhiker’s Guide and the real life development of the iPad shows how science fiction can effortlessly influence the development of new technology.

The science fiction collection Lagos 2060 is a more purposeful intervention. Published in 2013, it speculates about what it will be like to live in Lagos 100 years after Nigeria gained independence from the UK. It was born out of a creative writing workshop initiated by DADA books in Lagos. Foundation director of DADA, Ayodele Arigbabu, described the collection and other similar video and visual art work (in an email): “Far more than aesthetic indulgence, these renditions are a calibration of the changes deemed necessary in today’s political, technical and cultural infrastructure.”

Speculative design began as a means of imagining future, and often far-fetched, products and services. These designers aim to provoke debate about radically different futures. UK-based international leaders in this field, Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby, argue in their recent book Speculative Everything that if we speculate more, and about everything in our lives, reality will become more malleable. They say that the ideas freed by speculative design increase the odds of achieving desirable futures.

This has rung true for revolutionary inventors, from Nikola Tesla to the South Africa-born Elon Musk. Strong visions of the future have played a part in the irrational persistence needed to push through transformative technological change: whether that is the development of alternating current or PayPal. Stories help entrepreneurs through adversity and convince others to collaborate with them, whether or not their is a rational reason why a product or service will succeed.

How can musicians like Spoek, designers like Dunne & Raby and the Lagos writers combine the large-scale critical engagement of Afrofuturism with the dogged determination of Musk to make something happen?

One answer might come from initiatives like the AMPION Venture Bus Africa. The AMPION bus travels around the continent, picking up aspiring entrepreneurs to work with international startup and early-stage investment experts on the bus. Last year, AMPION helped create 30 new ventures in 15 African countries in industries from healthcare to agriculture. But this is a small, temporary group. How do we develop a more ongoing public debate about the future? And if so, what are the tools that will help this happen? Can professional futurists, whose job is to find different ways to explore the future, play a role?

Futurists to the rescue?

Gaston Berger was the Senegalese founder of the academic journal Prospectiv in 1957. To many, he was the first futurist, or at least one of the first people to describe themselves as one. He founded promotes the practice of playing out the human consequences of today’s action. This is about avoiding a fatalistic approach to the future: about being proactive and provoking change, as much as anticipating it.

Berger’s early work spawned a generation, and then another and another, of professional futurists. They work in different ways and different places. Some are in government, enticing and frightening politicians with the prospect of a different transport system, healthcare sector or national security regime. Some are consultants to large companies, offering advice on the way that trends like 3D printing or flying robots will change their sector. An article from 1996 does a good job of summarising the principles of this movement: don’t act like an ostrich and ignore the future by putting your head in the sand; don’t act like a fireman and just respond to threats to your future; and don’t focus just on insurance against for the future.

We need more than firemen

Heeding the second of these three warnings: if you decide to only engage with the future when it looks like a fire needs putting out, you run the risk of acting only in response to a world created by other people’s vision of the future.

In 1992, South Africa was in the middle negotiations to end apartheid. At the same time a group of political and academic leaders from across the country developed a series of possible future scenarios for the nation, publishing them in national newspapers. They called the four scenarios the the Mont Fleur visions: the Flight of the Flamingos promised an alternative future of inclusive democracy and growth. The Ostrich, Lame Duck and Icarus futures were damaged birds. In 2009, these futures were updated. But they did not lead to an ongoing campaign, and so had less of an effect on South Africa’s future than they might have otherwise. (Although the online community and library available via Foresight for Development have gone some way to changing this.)



What happens otherwise

Cities offer some of the most stark examples of what can happen when lack of long-term vision is missing from political leadership. Keller Easterling’s Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space studies the way that new economic zones in cities around the world are part of a new dynamic of power - where global architecture practices and multinational firms have more say over design than residents of the city. Easterling emphasises how infrastructure is not just a physical constraint, it is also the hidden rules that structure urban life. As power over this infrastructure moves beyond even the city or national government, little opportunity remains for citizens to play a role in developing the rules that govern their own urban ecology.

Right now, this power play for the future of cities via infrastructure planning is explicit in Africa. Vanessa Watson has collected fantastical architectural plans, which range from a Google US consulting arm’s redesign for Kigali in Rwanda to the Eko Atlantic coastal extension of Lagos engineered by Middle East consultancy Dar Al-Handasah. Most potent in this planning is the strong continuity with colonial planning for these cities. Watson calls them (33.59 minutes) “new emerging urban fantasies that mimic western cities with their glass box towers, tuscan villas and gated villages”. But she also notes that the proliferation of these images in city plans are less about catching up with the West than with the hypermodernism of the East. These have become an accepted local aspiration, and risk drowning out alternative visions for the future of these cities.

This kind of globally-empowered futurism can leave other ideas about the future in the margins, hidden in corners both physically and politically. These form the silent ‘collective unglamorous’, as Ash Amin from Cambridge University calls it. In an interview, he compare the unglamourous to the air we breath:

...noticed only when it begins to choke, when something goes wrong in the atmosphere. The unglamorous consists of all those things in the city that we take very little note of, but which are absolutely essential for our lives and our identities.

The pervasive collective acts like the firemen of urban futurism. It only responds in a crisis. There needs to be a more vibrant voice for this collective - a futurist for the everyday that can stand up to the urban dreams of extrastatecraft.

Softening infrastructure is part of the solution

Thomas Aquilina, an Architecture researcher also at Cambridge, travelled roughly the African Longitude 30°E line in 2012 and 2013. He collected thousands of images from six African cities. The images follow the life of recycled materials, and illustrate the importance of the informal material economy. In Johannesburg, for example, he documents how an ironing-board frame was used as a vending stand and later attached to a makeshift cart for steering. In his summary of his trip, he concludes:

Established structures and their respective functions were outstripped by another kind of operating and making use of the city. Neighbourhoods were based on an extended and congested social network, and their urban footprints continue to expand... These cities become critical subjects, not as a process of accelerated urbanisation, but examples of a radically different way of being in the city.



This detailed description gives voice to the collective unglamorous. It is a starting place for the much needed futurist of the everyday city.

At the same time, I have started to use the term soft infrastructure to describe potential developments in technology that will allow more people to have power over the changes to the infrastructure around them. There is technology in development that could dynamise existing structures by, for example, generating energy from paving stones. There are other new technologies that have few applications just yet, but which might find that “the street finds its own use for things” (from Burning Chrome by sci-fi author William Gibson). Mesh networks of sensors and phones can use any nearby connection to send messages without the need for centralised communication systems. There is a competition for the first airborne robot to solve freight problems by carrying 20kgs around Mount Kenya. Compared to current energy, communication and transport infrastructure, the developments offer an infrastructure that more of us could own and shape.

The promise of Afrofuturism in the city

Increasing interest in African culture from the V&A in London and the British Council’s strong local networks make it easier for me to engage directly with these exciting developments from the UK: to ask what can London learn from new cultural movements in Johannesburg and Lagos.

But I am wary of simplifying this situation by a warning from Matthew Gandy at UCL: “To treat the city as a living art installation, or compare it to the neutral space of a research laboratory, is both to de-historicize and to depoliticize its experience.”

I’d love to see a new initiative that doesn’t neglect this complexity, but pushes forward towards a more everyday activism aimed at owning the future of the cities we live in. This would learn from the mass appeal of cultural movements like Afrofuturism, take on the knowledge and international clout of the Foresight for Development programme, delivered with the entrepreneurial audacity of the Ampion Venture Bus Africa and Thomas Aquilina’s attention to detail.

It’s time to challenge William Gibson’s overused quote: “the future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” Sometimes when people use this phrase they seem to imply that Silicon Valley (or London’s Silicon Roundabout) know what the future will hold and the rest of us will follow. Let’s start to replace this with the Nigerian proverb: “the earth moves at different speeds depending on who you are.” This phrase picks out how differently and how personally technology becomes part of our lives. Gibson’s instinct that technology finds it’s life on the street is right, but sometimes it feels like he assume too much about which street on which continent.

***

This is unapologetically connected to FutureFest, the festival Nesta (where I work) is holding this weekend in London Bridge. These thoughts represent the ideas that piqued my interest while curating talks and exhibits based on the thought experiment of a future African city-superpower. George Clinton, Spoek Mathambo, Tegan Bristow and Fabian-Carlos Guhl (from Ampion Venture Bus) will be speaking during the weekend. Thomas Aquilina is displaying photographs from his trip and the architects of the Lagos 2060 project will take part in a debate on whether their fiction can lead to a different kind of future. Many thanks to Lynsey Smith, Kathleen Stokes and Cher Potter for their pointers along the way.

This article contains affiliate links, which means we may earn a small commission if a reader clicks through and makes a purchase. All our journalism is independent and is in no way influenced by any advertiser or commercial initiative. By clicking on an affiliate link, you accept that third-party cookies will be set. More information.