Fixing the Future? The Controversy Surrounding Tesla's ‘Gigafactory Berlin-Brandenburg’ as a Site of Contested Future-Making in Times of Climate Change

Abstract

In late 2019, CEO Elon Musk announced that Tesla would be building its first European car factory in Grünheide. While the factory was constructed with much political support and heralded as an inevitable step towards Germany's energy and mobility transition in the media, a small but persistent opposition managed to turn the factory into a site of controversy: a controversy not just about the factory's impact on its immediate environment, but also about ‘the future’. Positioned at the intersection between science and technology studies and critical future studies, this article approaches that controversy as a case study for contested future-making at a time when the looming threats of climate change and environmental destruction are rendering the question of ‘the future’ ever more urgent. Relying on an analysis of publicly available materials such as media reports, recordings of press conferences and speeches, promotional material by Tesla and documentation of the factory's approval process, it asks how and why the future became so ubiquitous in the controversy. In doing so, it makes visible how different imaginaries of the future clash with each other, how they are narrated, made persuasive, materialised, contested, silenced, and enforced in the present. Ultimately, the article seeks to highlight the potential of the controversy to challenge taken-for-granted imaginaries of the future as predetermined by a linear path of technological development and to create the kind of political contestation in which alternative imaginaries might emerge.