Developmental Speculation: Materializing the Future in China's Urban Planning Museums

ABSTRACT:Local governments in China are building thousands of urban planning exhibition centers across the country. These museums and their gigantic scale models depict cities years in the future, after local infrastructure and industrial development projects have been completed. Yet exhibition industry insiders say the futures they depict are unlikely to be realized, raising the question of why local governments would invest so much in producing them. I argue that the exhibition centers and their city models are a material form of financial speculation aimed at inspiring high-level officials to fund local officials' municipal development projects. The emerging ethnography of speculation identifies it as an engagement of the future in the present that is meant to compel and inspire. Through ethnographic work on China's museum industry, I show that China's new urban planning exhibition centers are a tool of "developmental speculation:" a postsocialist, intra-governmental, political, and financial form of risk-taking that stakes claims on future economic development and that works through inspirational narrative. In the museum industry, local officials and museum production companies use material acts of modeling and design to link local initiatives to state policies, and to meld the present city with the future city in the scale models. The scale models embody past, present, and future together in one heterochronic material object. Thus, if speculation works through fantastical narratives, China's new urban planning exhibition centers are narratives modeled in material, meant to inspire higher-level officials. They are speculation materialized.