Future Spaces

Beyond Neutrality

The library (and the archive) has long been imagined as a container: a passive structure in which documents rest until summoned. Its supposed neutrality has lent it authority, but that neutrality has always been an illusion. In the tropics, the history of libraries and archives is bound to practices of silencing — privileging certain epistemologies while relegating others to invisibility. The result has been a record that documents presence while manufacturing absence.

If earlier posts in this series traced the ways in which forests, reefs, tools, smells, and sounds function as archives beyond text, this final contribution turns to formal institutions. It asks: how might libraries and archives act, rather than merely represent? What would it mean to imagine them not as monuments of storage but as infrastructures embedded in ecological and political struggle?

Rethinking the Institutional Form

The twentieth-century library and archive were shaped by ideals of growth, permanence, and control. Expanding collections, ever-larger facilities, and sophisticated climate-controlled storage symbolized professional success. Yet such models are unsustainable under contemporary conditions of ecological collapse and resource scarcity.

An alternative can be drawn from degrowth epistemologies. Here, sufficiency replaces accumulation, repair takes precedence over expansion, and adaptability counts more than standardization. This suggests institutional forms that are materially sustainable. Small-scale, modular structures built from locally available and renewable materials can reduce dependency on high-cost, high-energy infrastructures. Such approaches emphasize maintainability and resilience, situating knowledge & memory institutions within the ecological and material conditions of their territories. Instead of extractive buildings that consume energy and materials, the library becomes a regenerative space that participates in the metabolism of its environment.

Libraries as Regenerative Infrastructure

Examples already exist, albeit in fragmented form. Community seed libraries operate as both archives of biodiversity and engines of food sovereignty, placing ecological continuity at the center of the archival mission. Solar-powered archival stations safeguard both documentary and environmental data without reliance on fragile national grids. Rural cooperatives maintain small repositories that double as repair shops, classrooms, or kitchens — hybrid spaces where the archive is inseparable from everyday practices of survival.

These models illustrate a broader principle: archives and libraries can be designed not only to house memory but to sustain life. A knowledge & memory institution need not be measured by the linear meters of shelving it controls. It can be assessed instead by its capacity to support adaptive strategies: preserving rainwater-harvesting knowledge, transmitting soil-restoration techniques, or maintaining oral histories of ecological repair.

Ecological Memory and Climate Justice

The ecological crisis forces a reconsideration of librarian and archival scope. If knowledge & memory institutions continue to define their holdings primarily in textual or audiovisual terms, they risk irrelevance in a century where survival depends on ecological intelligence.

Preserving agroecological calendars, fishing taboos, medicinal repertoires, or oral maps of water sources is not an anthropological luxury — it is essential infrastructure for climate adaptation. Cataloguing these materials requires metadata systems that acknowledge their relational, seasonal, and embodied nature. Libraries must therefore expand their descriptive practices to capture not only authorship and provenance but also ecological context, ritual timing, and interspecies relations.

By curating ecological memory, libraries and archives can reposition themselves as actors within climate justice movements. They become mediators between diverse knowledge traditions, creating bridges where Indigenous and rural expertise, scientific monitoring, and urban community practices intersect. This does not entail assimilation of one system into another, but rather the recognition that resilience emerges from plurality.

From Custodianship to Political Agency

To move in this direction, knowledge & memory institutions must abandon the posture of neutrality. Historically, claims to impartiality have concealed complicity with structures of erasure: the extraction of data without attribution, the preservation of colonial categories, the neglect of communities whose knowledge did not conform to archival norms.

A different role is possible. Archives can become repositories of legal evidence for land restitution claims. Libraries can serve as protective infrastructures for threatened languages or oral traditions. Metadata systems can be redesigned to document not only presence but absence — explicitly recording gaps produced by dispossession or displacement. Such interventions do not undermine archival principles; they expand them, embedding accountability and justice within professional practice.

Political agency also entails refusing extractive partnerships. Instead of "including" communities in externally designed projects, institutions must accept forms of shared governance. This may involve relinquishing unilateral authority over collections, allowing communities to determine access protocols, or adopting plural ontologies within cataloguing systems. Authority is not extended as a gesture of generosity; it is redistributed as a matter of justice.

Libraries and Archives as Terrain

If libraries and archives once mirrored the geographies of empire, their future lies in reversing that orientation. Rather than storing tropical (or any other) knowledge in metropolitan vaults, they can circulate authority outward, embedding themselves in the territories and communities where knowledge and memory are lived.

This transformation demands more than symbolic gestures. It requires rethinking institutional form, diversifying collections to encompass ecological memory, and assuming political agency in defense of dispossessed voices. Archives and libraries can no longer present themselves as neutral containers. They must be recognized —and must recognize themselves— as terrains of struggle, ecological infrastructures, and political actors.

Only then can they remain relevant in the century of climate breakdown and epistemic repair.

  This chronicle is echoed in the blog post "From Growth to Degrowth," where the same topic is explored from a librarian's point of view.