From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want

now Better Block is an international movement. Roberts calls this work ‘guerrilla bottom-up place-making’.

‘The way we live is eroding our capacity for deep, sustained, perceptive attention – the building block of intimacy, wisdom and cultural progress,’ Maggie Jackson writes in Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age.

When the future disappears from our imagining, when we get stuck in the present or in the past, we’re in trouble. Rather than it being some kind of academic concept to suggest that creating spaces of safety and hope is fundamental to our being able to start rebuilding our imaginations, in Sandra’s story we can see how it functions in reality.

activist groups are often good at organising and campaigning, but tend to lack storytelling skills. ‘If you don’t [work to] address those underlying narratives and work to … shift them … but also create alternative narratives that are about liberation, then it’s going to be really difficult to do that work.’

‘Disimagination machine’: the phrase leapt out at me, and for so many reasons.52 If there is a disimagination machine, it certainly seems to be working. Attention spans are in decline. We have an increasingly superficial approach to facts and knowledge. Curiosity in the classroom is falling.53

we were just trying to spark something that might unlock a creative spirit, a renewed sense of possibility, a fresh and hopeful way to think about the future, without any thought that it could spread to other places. But spread it did.

What if they felt no fear that they were about to get the answers to these big questions wrong (because they’d internalised that there’s only one right answer, one way to be in the world, one path to follow)? What if young people felt an unshakeable belief that anything were possible and that they could achieve whatever they felt capable of in that

how would we ever take on the imagination-devouring dragon of endless growth and economic development and replace it with something more humane, more interesting, and better suited to meet the needs of the people and the planet?

Even among people who work within the ‘creative industries’, their imagination seems increasingly harnessed to create demand for things nobody really needs, whose production is increasingly pushing our human and ecological systems to the brink of collapse – almost as if imagination has been coopted in the service of our own extinction.