The Prospect of Elsewhere: Engaging the Future through Aspirations in Asia

There has been a recent surge of interest in “the future” as a subject and object of analysis in human geography, mostly centered on uncertainty and threats posed by terrorism, transspecies epidemics, and climate change. In contrast, relatively little attention has been given to that ways in which humans engage futurity in their everyday lives and geographies. Although acknowledging some important exceptions, in this article we seek to build specifically on anthropologist Arjun Appadurai's call for a more people-centered and “democratic” consideration of future making. What Appadurai terms an “ethics of possibility” is about rescuing the future from the “avalanche of numbers” associated with expert calculation in the realms of science and technology, security and geopolitics, and health and insurance. We argue that human geographers are among the “culturally oriented social scientists” who are equipped for scholarly advancement of an ethics of possibility. Our own geographic contribution emerges from field-based qualitative material collected as part of a wider collaborative research project on aspirations in urban Asia. In the accounts that we present from cities in China, Indonesia, and Vietnam, it is the prospect of elsewhere—and of being elsewhere—that nurtures imaginings of aspirational futures and spurs efforts to realize them. In addition to drawing empirical attention to people, places, and regions that do not often feature in Anglophone human geography, our article contributes to geographic conceptualization of how futures are being prospected in cultural imaginaries and through an array of spatial practices.