Boundaries: Region names and political geography in a solarpunk future
I guess I'm no authority on solarpunk, but I'd like to take a swing at thinking about what we will or should call certain places. What should we do about currently contested regions? What about situations where multiple places have the same name (Washington)? What will we call the future's equivalent of countries, states, provinces, cities, towns?
Welcome back to Futurism, a blog about the future we all hope to have someday. Today's piece is a loose look at what we'll call different places.
The easy part: Well-recognized names
More or less, England will probably still be called England far into the future, whether or not it is its own nation-state (i.e. separate from the United Kingdom). Likewise for Scotland. Maybe the borders of England and, say, Scotland will matter less. It'll be, I guess, how counties used to be in England before Surveys took place, and how "cities" and "towns" don't really have borders now (except for the Postal Service; I'll come back to that later).
Places with known native names
- Wales will probably (hopefully?) have a new English name that is closer to the Welsh name for the land, "Cymru" (Wikipedia has it pronounced like "Cumry" with a trilled R). Maybe Cambria? Wikipedia suggests that one. We're also all acutely familiar with that name thanks to the Cambrian Explosion.
- New Zealand will hopefully be called Aotearoa or something similar.
- Greece might decide to be called Hellas or Hellada¹ in English. (Personally I was going to go with Hellenica but that's not the right name.)
- Maybe Cascadia will be recognized as its own known region? It's not as prominent as the movement to call Aotearoa that, but this is definitely something I've heard about.
I suspect, and hope, that most of these places will end up regaining their original names or endonyms [the names they call themselves], possibly adapted to the language of the speaker (i.e. Anglicized) for easier use.
¹ About Hellada: after reading the Wikipedia article on the "Names of Greece", I came across something about the tribe names that joined to form what is now Greece, and thought that it might be better to divide them up; but they are a solid country now and as far as I know they've pretty much always had that coherent identity, so more or less the name that will stick will be the one for "Greece" rather than more fine regional names like "Aeolia".
North America
The New World, North America in particular, has been beaten with colonialism since Europe discovered it in approximately 1492. This has led to terrible tragedies and atrocities like the Trail of Tears and the wider genocide of the natives.
I almost hope that the regions for North America will end up changing more than any of the other regions: breaking apart, changing names, for the most part leaving no trace of what us white people have done to the map.
- Cascadia might be recognized as its own region. I don't know if this correlates to any First Nations lands.
- For the most part, Native tribe names and rough areas will probably be used, at least in their honor and in their ancestors' honor. This might be hard because doing this, no matter how, ignores the way the natives used and shared the land prior to the European invasion.
- It's also possible that we'll end up reusing a lot of the same region identifiers we already use; although, disambiguating them from the rest of the world might be useful. For example, you know what general area I'm talking about if I say "in the midwest". If I start talking about "the south" though, you'll have to hope there are enough context clues to tell whether I'm talking about Alabama, Brazil, or Australia.
- Maybe the most likely scenario is a combination of the above. Maybe we'll see Cascadia become a common name worldwide to talk about the greater Seattle and Vancouver region, The Midwest to talk about Tornado Alley, and... honestly I can't come up with a good Native name to talk about such a large area (I'm trying to come up with one for the South).
- Texas will probably still be Texas.
Delivery services
This one was a tricky one but while writing the other sections I thought of a possible solution.
So the problem is: how do you address mail, and know how and where to deliver it, when the borders of a named region are fuzzy, and not static?
In the US and in many other countries, postal codes help to get things where they're going. However, if you're going to get rid of authority, someone's still got to issue and define postal codes.
One possible solution here is to use both a locally-recognizable address, maybe even still including a postal code that corresponded to that area, and a Pluscode or something similar. Pluscodes in particular work well for this because they're short, reasonably precise, and already well defined. Unlike postal codes, which are assigned by usually the government themselves or a government-sponsored company like the United States Postal Service, Pluscodes were designed by Google and how they work is completely in the open.
Having multiple redundant forms of address provided means that if one is off, the other can be used to "correct" it into a more well-known form. If you start seeing a bunch of nearby addresses using a new street name, for example, you could determine that your map needs to update that street name. If a character in a Pluscode is mis-written or mis-read, the local address can also help to correct that.
Local addresses, street, house, and unit numbers in particular, are always useful to couriers so that they know what building or unit to deliver to. Plus, this helps foster community and region identity.
Thoughts on national identity
In today's world, the United States is always considered a "country", and the United Kingdom is usually considered one "country" for mapping purposes, but the European Union, although it is functionally very similar to both, is not considered a "country" on any map or postal system. The part of me distraught with my American identity is very upset by this.
I would think the main distinction is military power, but I'm not sure the UK has a military under its name (I think it's just England), and US states have their own small militaries, confusingly called the National Guard.
This is weird and upsetting to me and I want it to stop (preferably, by dividing into smaller regions, i.e. by state).
References
Pluscodes landing page (Google)
Pluscodes technical details (GitHub)
P.S.
I know I missed a few of the questions I asked. One of these was about place names like Washington where there are several of them. My thought is the most populous or well known of the ones in a region would get dibs on the name, and they'd be distinguished from each other by region(s). For delivery purposes, this is another great reason to pair with a pluscode: unless there are two "separate" Washingtons right next to each other, the general area that the pluscode points to helps to disambiguate.
I'd also like to remark that this entire post really relies on the dissolution of the State, i.e. an anarchist system or a minarchist world government. I have a lot of doubt that such a thing is possible or sustainable as long as humans are humans.
Maybe sometime, I'll come back to this topic with some fresh thoughts on regional names and rough areas. Get a big, zoomable SVG vector map, write about it and where the names came from, and all that. What do you think needs to be on the map? What regions should be on it, what should they be called? Send me an email!
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