A sizeable majority of the world’s population (more than three in five) now believe the world is getting worse.

Alongside commercial advertising, there might be prompts and messages that encourage critical thought; online maps and augmented reality that enable easy access to history and experience as well as to future plans; or environments that prompt insight and empathy, or that respond to your movements or expressions in ways that make you feel more alive

Indeed, it is this ability to grasp and challenge at the same time, to sense directions of change while simultaneously trying to shift and shape them, that makes imagination both most useful and most exciting.

the biggest changes were those that involved new ways of seeing the connections between things, or recognising different groups as ends rather than just means, worthy of dignity and respect.

I’m convinced that we’re suffering from an ‘imaginary crisis’. By this, I don’t mean that the various crises around us aren’t real, but rather that there’s a deep malaise affecting our capacity for imagination, whether social or political.

He encouraged looking at people’s expressed preferences and behaviours—for example, drawing on where people actually chose to gather in a home, perhaps in a corner that caught the sun, or how they used public spaces—rather than an architect’s assumptions about how the city should be built.

This prompted me to review many of the hundreds of books published each year on society, economics and politics. While many offer a striking diagnosis, most offer little in the way of prescription, which is usually left to a final chapter.

Such thought experiments can also go wider to address more fundamental questions: what if a society had to operate with no money but all the feedback tools of modern digital media? What if all pay levels were set collectively? What if there were zero growth for many decades? The good experiments challenge dominant orthodoxies and take us through th

Lewis Mumford wrote, ‘The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity’.8 Cities’ metabolisms take energy and turn it into knowledge, and bigger cities proportionately generate more patents, more ideas and more GDP, helped by