Culture

The Social Responsibility of Wakanda’s Golden City

The designer behind Black Panther’s beloved city spent 10 months and 500 pages envisioning a futuristic urban space that puts people before technology.
The Afrofuturist design of Wakanda and its capital, Golden City.Marvel Studios

The first thing Black Panther production designer Hannah Beachler did when she was creating the fictional capital city of Wakanda was to research the people. “Not the technology,” she is quick to point out—though it is a futuristic city. The people.

“Technology is there to serve our lives, not for us to serve technology,” Beachler said during an interview at the CityLab Detroit conference.