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Paper short abstract:

In this paper I will address the conflicts between the multiple futures embedded in infrastructures. I will use Barcelona as a case study, contrasting the multiple temporalities and discordant futures in the new sustainable mobility infrastructures and the digital platform delivery companies.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will problematize the notion of “the future” in two senses. First, arguing that futures are not single but multiple, and they are not objects but projects. In this sense, before contributing to propose alternative futures, Anthropology may need to describe and analyze this multiplicity first. Second, by focusing on the futures embedded in infrastructures rather than on narratives of the future (as part of the anthropology of the future has done so far). I will use the conflicts between mobility infrastructures in Barcelona as a case study. These mobility infrastructures are built in a complex superposition, and they project futures that may be radically discordant. On the one hand, the new sustainable mobility infrastructures designed by the city council, essentially the bicycle routes and super-blocks, are designed to “pacify” and slow down a city that was designed, in previous decades, for high speed motorized traffic. These new sustainable infrastructures propose a new, “alternative” future to the modernist future embedded in already-existing mobility infrastructures, in terms of superposition and "undoing" rather than dismantling. On the other hand, I discuss the digital platform companies that offer food and merchandise delivery services. These companies use the new sustainable mobility infrastructures in ways that contradict the project of pacification, as speed-efficient infrastructures for delivering goods, generating congestion and accidents, and ultimately questioning the centrality of the street as public space that sustainability models aim towards. This paper will address these conflicts in terms of multiple temporalities and discordant futures.