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

the problem isn’t that people don’t understand what the problems are, rather that the problems are so big that people feel overwhelmed and this in turn shuts down the imagination.

abstract thinking, vital to our ability to be imaginative, is ‘taking ideas from various other places in your brain – things you’ve heard, things you’ve done, things you’ve thought – and putting them together in unique but valuable ways. We don’t have the attention span to do that anymore, and it’s not just young people. It’s everybody.’

‘A metred parking spot is an inexpensive short-term lease for a plot of precious urban real estate’ Rebar, the San Francisco–based group who promote the idea, reflected.16 They took the idea to social media and it took off in hundreds of cities around the world, ‘a global experiment in remixing, reclaiming and reprogramming vehicular space for soci

‘Depression’, writes Ruth Cain, a senior lecturer in law at the University of Kent, ‘may appear almost self-protective: an opt-out from an unwinnable set of continual competitions’.27 Although stigmatised in many ways, it is the healthy response to a mad, uncaring world.

In his book Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy, Stephen Duncombe wrote that ‘unless progressives acknowledge and accept a politics of imagination, desire and spectacle, and most important, make it ethical and make it our own, we will bring about our “ruin rather than preservation”.’

What if we could simply walk through a door and go anywhere, to any place, or any life, or any possible future? In one passage, Hamid describes what the future felt like once this had happened, and had all settled down: ‘The apocalypse appeared to have arrived and yet it was not apocalyptic, which is to say that while the changes were jarring they

‘The way decision-makers see it is that the world is not run by people and systems that require imaginative citizens, that require dreamers and thinkers and makers – we’re not needed in the economic models planned out for us.’

One of the leading researchers in this area is Donna Rose Addis, Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory and Aging and a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto. Her work has redefined the function of episodic memory as being ‘primarily future-focused’, and she recently discovered that some parts of the hippoc

rebuilding of the collective imagination

the team made a collective mental leap away from thinking of the city as a machine or a factory to seeing the city as a ‘heterotopia’, a multilayered patchwork of innovation occurring at all scales, from neighbourhood democracy initiatives to urban food production to entrepreneurial and community-based innovation of every stripe.