Worldbuilding is always neutral; Worldbuilding is never neutral.
The process has no political agenda of necessity, yet its means and ends are always political.
I love the kind of statement that holds two seemingly contradictory truths together. In this case the aim is to puzzle out what I notice about who uses worldbuilding as a term and what that use means in practice. When used in the realm of creativity, for instance, worldbuilding is a technique. It is something one can do well. There are listicles with tips for improvement. Alternatively, if one were to take the term as a way to sense the built world around them, the politics of urban planning, design, and, architecture become legible. These two ways of framing worldbuilding are connected. One looks at means and the other at ends, and of course taken together one is fairly neutral in a political sense, whereas the other obviously constructs limits to social life that can be generative and restricting at once and to different people.
To help build out an example of neutral worldbuilding, I did a web search for 5 tips on worldbuilding and chose the first result: Savannah Gilbo’s linked article "5 Worldbuilding Tips for Sci-Fi and Fantasy Writers.” The tips are aimed at making a world that feels real to the reader:
Go narrow and deep in your worldbuilding, not wide and shallow.
Determine what kind of magic or technology will exist in your story world.
Avoid generalizations when it comes to the people or creatures who populate your story world.
Your story world needs its own internal logic—for every cause, there’s an effect; for every action, there’s a reaction.
Use your target audience’s age range to help inform your story’s learning curve.
These tips in sequence are developed in order to help the writing feel immersive for readers, to allow readers to “maintain a sense of wonder,” to produce a reality effect and a world that makes sense, and to maintain trust with the reader. That these tips could be applied to any creative worldbuilding project points to their neutrality, yet they all aim at the legibility of the world for the reader. In so doing, they aim to support a wide readership.
Here I think of the MCU and the work worldbuilding has done to support a global anglophone cinema with clear streamlined plots, recognizable characters, and a tangible storyworld. These tips support an understanding of worldbuilding that recognizes each project will be one storyworld among many and that these worlds will be legible to many types of reader. So there is a logic of what storyworld scholar Marie-Laure Ryan calls the aesthetics of proliferation at work here (here is a link to Ryan’s chapter on the subject). An underlying logic is not necessarily a politics, but it supports one: in this case the advice to help make worlds that will be enticing and unique implies a plethora of worlds that are not those things. Put differently, it implies of market for such storyworlds. So in a sense, the surface level neutrality speaks to the similarity of creatives and their practices, even if the worlds they imagine are distinct.
Let’s snap back to the second example of non-neutral worldbuilding. Think of the wall as a structure: Delimiting territory; Imposing a barrier with a check point; Keeping some people on one side and some people on the other. This image of the built world demonstrates a strict politics. The wall stands in as the outcome of a collective decision to arrange space and people into a configuration that serves particular ends.
Take the segregations efforts in the US that played out through highway construction, for instance. Between 1950 and 1990, whole Black neighbourhoods were separated by the development of highways across the US. Graphics journalist Rachael Dottle, writer Laura Bliss, and New York Times graphics and data analyst Pablo Robles produced a beautiful, devastating, and hopeful report that visualizes the wall-like impacts of highways on Black communities across the US (link to article on infrastructural racism). One can obviously imagine this kind of wall building as segregation in other regions as well. Gaza (link to Aljazeera article on the Gaza strip) features a coeval form of non-neutral world building, and one ought in equal measure to call it world destroying.
Looking to the territory I write from, Tkaronto, we find an inverse example from the US highway. Here, the burying of rivers closed down travel routes of one kind, canoeing, for another, settlement and then petroculture (link to a map of buried rivers in the region). The Huron Wendat called this place Tkaronto in the Iroquoian language to designate “the place in the water where the trees are standing.” The current, anglicized name of the city gestures to what is buried. Rather than dividing neighbourhoods and peoples with highways or walls, the making subterranean of the rivers in Tkaronto separates the Huron Wendat as well as Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Métis peoples from the waterways. It takes away the longstanding mobility of river travel and a form of life deeply tied to place and living in place in a good way.
These struggles, of anti-racism, against genocide, and for reconciliation are not commensurate, yet they face the same built world techniques. My hunch in exploring these techniques from the side of creative practice, where I started this rumination, and infrastructural barriers, where I went to show the non-neutrality of worldbuilding, is that worldbuilding as concept really does connect the two. Moving forward in this project means finding sites where I can think through both at the same time. It might also mean a revision of Gilbo’s recommendations, just as much as unpacking how infrastructural planning is a creative worldbuilding practice that could benefit from some storyworld consideration.