WHAT DOES A FUTURE LOOK LIKE WHEN IT’S IMAGINED BY THE COMMUNITIES WHO WILL ACTUALLY LIVE IT?
ON WHAT TO PONDER BY VIGNESH SANKAR:
This is perhaps a slightly self-indulgent answer, but I've just finished my Master's in Architecture, where I spent the past year designing a speculative project imagining better futures for the British Tamizh community in East Ham.
When people think about diaspora, I often feel we're encouraged to look backwards. We talk about preservation, nostalgia, memory and what we've lost. Those conversations are important, but over the past year I've found myself becoming much more interested in the opposite question: what do we want to inherit from the future?
Growing up, I don't think anyone ever asked me what a Tamizh future could look like. We were often encouraged to preserve culture, but rarely invited to imagine what it might become.
Diasporic communities are so often asked to preserve culture, but I don't think culture survives by being frozen in time. The Tamizh culture I grew up with in London isn't identical to the one my parents grew up with, nor should it be. It's constantly adapting, borrowing, improvising and creating something new. That's not a loss of authenticity; it's proof that it's alive.
The question I've been sitting with lately is: who gets to imagine the future?
So much of the future we see in films, books and architecture is imagined by people with power, while diasporic communities are often spoken about through heritage or integration rather than possibility. I think imagining better futures is an act of care. It allows us to move beyond simply asking how we preserve our communities, and instead ask how they might flourish.
I don't think we spend enough time giving ourselves permission to dream about what comes next. So if I could leave readers with one question, it would be this:
What does a future look like when it's imagined by the communities who will actually live it?
For more RECS like this one, check out the rest of vol. 009:
