Another World Is Possible

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

There is a wonderful comment by Bertolt Brecht on art: he asks which works of art endure, and answers ‘those that are never completed’. Those that live, thrive and become meaningful to successive generations are the ones that leave them space to adapt, add and subtract (something always true of pieces of music and theatre, which have to be interpre

Indeed, as a rule, the imagined places that were most sealed off from the world had the least influence (and the vast majority of utopian communes quickly collapsed). Those that were more interlinked with the world found it easier to evolve, adapt and influence by way of example.

What if data were used by citizens to oversee governments, not the other way around?

A good example is a book by the French writer Jean Giono, The Man Who Planted Trees, which tells the story of a man who plants a hundred acorns each day in a barren landscape in Provence in southern France. In the story, this leads in time to the renaissance of the land and a return of insects, bees and birds. Many assumed that it was a true story;

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

On the next level are the generative ideas. These are more specific concepts that can be applied in many fields and give substance to the broad visions. They include ideas such as universal human rights; national citizenship; needs-based welfare; social insurance; the circular economy; central planning; market-based solutions; conservation approach

The idea of retirement would lose its meaning and working lives would more closely resemble those in the pre-industrial era, where the elderly continue working and contributing as they can. We might expect a great expansion of education for this age group, building on initiatives like the University of the Third Age, in which the elderly teach each

The physicist Wolfgang Pauli once said of an unimpressive theory, ‘It’s not only not right; it isn’t even wrong,’ meaning that it wasn’t sufficiently sharply defined to be proven either true or false.

As the great urbanist Patrick Geddes put it, ‘By creating we think, by living we learn’.