Introducing Shaktiville
The Strange and the Familiar
You’ve probably heard a thousand stories that begin with ‘once upon a time.’ Can you name one story that begins with ‘once upon a place’? Why does time play such an important role in mythmaking and not place?
Before you start objecting, let’s admit right away that semi-mythical places are strewn throughout the literatures of the world. Ramrajya, Heaven, Atlantis, Mordor…. the list is long. But, as we have seen earlier with ecological thought, there’s a difference between thinking with time or a place and thinking about a time or a place.
Myths use time as a medium for thinking while places are not as important. That’s especially true in our contemporary era, where most places are a relatively short plane ride away. Meanwhile the past and the future are as distant as ever. Places across the earth have become familiar while history remains alien.
Principle #1: Worldmaking needs distance and unease. The unknown unknown.
What about familiarity? For that, let’s take a closer look at another childhood pastime: 20 questions. Remember how it starts? You think of something and we have to guess what you have thought in twenty questions or less.
The universally recommended first question: is it a person, a place or a thing? There you go, places and people are media for 20 questioned thought. Turns out people and places work really well when you’re seeking to reduce uncertainty.
Principle #2: Worldmaking needs familiarity and comfort. The known known and the known unknown.
There’s a lot of work to be done to flesh out how time and place are signs of the unknown and the known, but that will have to wait for another day (hint: time is elusive, immersed in the unknown unknown while place is familiar and solid, the known unknown). We have a world to build.
Tell us, what kind of setting combines time and place, familiarity and mystery? We can think of two: the forest and the city. Both are strange and full of strangers, human and nonhuman. Both have familiar niches. For our first sensome, we had to pick one of the two. Since we have been working in the city (Bangalore, to be precise) already, the city won the race over the forest.
Shaktivel (read this article for context) has most of the qualities we are looking for in a sensome, except for one: it’s 100% real. We need a dollop of the mythical in the sensome so that we can sense alternate realities alongside the one we inhabit. Out of that necessity was born Shaktiville, a mythified take on the Bangalore of 2023.
Shaktiville
We want to build Shaktiville on the line between pure imagination, with spaceships taking off for unknown galatic destinations, and realistic, like an art movie made in the eighties. Closer to the realistic end, it should have things we can make happen today, such as solar desalination and community supported local farming, so that Shaktivel (the real world inspiration for Shaktiville) continues to have a small carbon footprint even as the community prospers.
Further away from current reality, let’s imagine a city designed not only for humans, but also for other species. A community centre that not only has sustainable architecture, but is a truly mixed use space: meeting rooms for crows alongside meeting rooms for people.
The second is in the same location as the first, but it’s a more distant place, for it is populated with beings who make unfamiliar claims on citizenship. Shaktiville has to make room for them too. Crows and dogs and house cats, for sure, but also:
Tigers
and Crocodiles
and Lizards
Principle #3: There’s no city without citizens, and their census is a contentious affair.
Principle #4: Aliens make a place unfamiliar; welcoming them as citizens makes the city accessible and unfamiliar at once. Might be the sweet spot to aim for.