Future-Oriented-Futures

“The plans include new residential and attractive commercial properties, an innovative campus as a think tank for future energy supply as well as a centre for education and government offices…characterised by innovation.”

— City of Cottbus on the urban development between the city and the Cottbuser Ostsee

“The museum is now a laboratory; the laboratory a university; the government sits adjacent to the think tank; the think tank is now arbiter of the media. The think tank is that allover, ambient state—a sensibility—writ large, at planetary scale. Call out this feeling for what it is. Not just a pattern or network, it’s an aesthetic.”

— Pamela M. Lee

The Cottbuser Ostsee project sees an open-pit lignite mine transformed into “the future largest artificial lake in Germany”. While fossil fuels-turned-green-energy company LEAG “restores” the post-mining environment, the City of Cottbus promises further transformation around the lake: a multipurpose urban landscape fit for nature tourism, recreational sports, scientific inquiry and private investment. A 2016 planning report released by the city frames the project as an “opportunity to develop future-orientated infrastructure and attractions without the burden of previous tourist cliches.” And while much of the planned infrastructure centers on (the tourist cliche of) sporting recreation, additional “features”, the report says, will be integral to realizing the Cottbuser Ostsee brand. “Simply focusing on sports and recreation will make it hard to gain a foothold in the trans-regional market,” it argues, and therefore “other distinguishing features will…have to be created to raise the lake’s profile” such as “floating architecture” and “future-oriented, environmentally friendly and independent energy production”. More recent plans promise a floating solar farm, a “green energy landscape” for wind and solar “embodying the change of energy generation”, and a “think tank for future energy supply”. Within the discourses and media aesthetics moving between this planning process (which is, by definition, future-oriented) and the promise of infrastructure that will itself be “oriented” towards an even more distant future, a mood emerges, a movement (though not yet an energy).

Future-oriented-futures is a “think tank aesthetic”,¹ a mood, and a constant movement attempting to balance contrasting temporalities: the processual materiality of the future-making present (data-making, mood-boarding, designing, building, pitching, powerpointing, circling the grey lake with a research studio in tow) and a more hopeful/sustainable/greener otherwise. It’s stretching towards the promise/imaginary of the prototype, where a sustained optimism for Sustainability, as well as “the application of ever finer and more environmentally pervasive forms of calculation and computation”,² extends this promise/imaginary, this future-otherwise, into a distant horizon, before snapping back, like an elastic band, to our troubled present. Through all this back and forth, we can’t properly make out this horizon… but we’re told (over and over): it’s bright green, bejeweled with wind turbines and definitely not a mirage. 

Drawing from works tracing the politics of elasticity by Shameem Black, Silvia Lindtner, Maria José de Abreu and Pamela M. Lee, perhaps future-oriented-futures as an object of inquiry could help us make sense of the political relations shaping the so-called Green Energy Transition. Tracing the elastic back and forth between future-oriented design and an imagined future, a movement that is less conduit, than “boundlessly middle”³ could show us how this process might flexibly encompass seemingly contradictory political ideas—such as rising enthusiasms for authoritarianism and the neoliberal “green capital denial”⁴ seen in Lusatia and globally.

1. Pamela Lee, Think Tank Aesthetics, 2020 ↩︎
2. Orit Halpern, The Smartness Mandate, 2022, p. 245 ↩︎
3. Maria José de Abreu, The Charismatic Gymnasium, 2020, p. 131 ↩︎
4. Jesse Goldstein, Planetary Improvement, 2018 ↩︎