Another World Is Possible

But these moments are relatively rare. Many roles and institutions that are meant to be wise—from judges to parliaments to boards—literally never have these moments of shared conscious reflection on the loops that connect thought, action and results. Yet, it’s not far-fetched to hope that in the future, every profession or expert will do just this,

But the best ways to imagine may be the ones that position this work as a collaboration—done with people rather than to or for them—giving people and communities the freedom to learn by doing and to adapt the general into the particular.

Grafting (or combining) involves taking an idea from one field and applying it to another.

The same is true in architecture: over-planned model cities rarely work as intended and are hard to love, whereas the best designs have built into them a capacity to adapt and evolve.

Hall was thinking of figures like Ebenezer Howard, a contradictory combination who was both an anarchist and a planner. Horrified by the unhealthy and unhappy cities of Victorian England, he came up with the idea of the garden city—partly inspired by Edward Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward. Garden cities would solve the problems of congestion and h

But ‘backcasting’ methods quickly run into the sand for the reasons cited earlier—time moves in only one direction and all real-world processes involve learning, adaptation and evolution. The ideal of working backwards from a chosen end—the engineering model—usually needs to be combined with the mindset of a gardener, who focuses on beginnings rath

The most powerful way to conceptualise imagination is as a loop, so that we imagine a future society that is itself better able to imagine and then act on its best ideas.

Wisdom is all about appreciating contexts.

While the trend for a century or more has been to make urban environments frictionless, a recent counter-trend has tried to slow things down, reintroducing pedestrianised areas, or making children’s play areas slightly less safe so as to help them learn about risk. Going further, we could imagine environments that prompt wisdom, not just by providi