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 post-socialist, 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. Keywords: speculation, materiality, cities, the future, exhibition, design, China
As China's growth slows, the government targets high-value-added services for development. These policies can surface in unexpected places. One is the booming museum industry where, as local ...governments build museums as part of development projects, museum production companies grow rapidly on government capital. For one design firm, the theme of 'growth' animated not only a history museum they designed, but also directors' stories about the firm, and rituals celebrating their IPO. I find that all these narratives of growth celebrated the enmeshment of state and market. The ethnography of state-market hybridity shows how market freedom is an ideology requiring constant maintenance. But in China markets are understood as tools for government caretaking, raising instead the question: when state-market hybridity is the explicit ideology, how is it maintained? I argue that 'exhibitions of growth' do this by claiming that this hybridity itself will drive growth and transform the economy.
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