Interrogating imagination infrastructure

Report Keri Facer, Ruth Potts Insight 2025

Asks what forms of ‘imagination infrastructure’ might help foster a critical, creative imagination to take us beyond existing social arrangements and open-up pathways beyond and outside the current polycrisis.

What imagination infrastructure might help foster a critical, creative imagination to take us beyond existing social arrangements and open-up pathways beyond and outside the current polycrisis?

A creative, critical imagination requires appropriate time, space and resources to:

Enable people to unsettle their assumptions and challenge taken-for-granted narratives
Encounter diverse others, listen deeply, recognise and value each other
Engage with the distinctive specifics of place, history and possibility
Maintain distinctive, diverse ways of knowing over time, creating deep archives as future resources
Tell old stories and experiment with new stories
Mobilise alliances to realise shared collective visions

These conditions require an understanding of economic, regulatory and legal processes that value and protect a diversity of imaginaries in the social ecology

We must ask:

How is a plurality of images of the future being maintained or closed down by the social and cultural practices of our societies?
How are encounters between diverse perspectives, experiences, and ways of knowing being encouraged or prevented? Where is this happening? What monocultures are being sustained?
How are flows of imagination and ideas between spaces enabled and impeded; whose ideas are flowing and whose are stuck?
How are diverse ways of knowing valued or neglected in different settings?
How are repeated encounters enabled sufficiently to create new relationships, go deeply into ideas – or being disrupted and impeded?
How are practices of slow attention and inquiry being supported or blocked?
How are old stories being archived and held, and new stories being fostered?
How are the transitions between thinking and action, relations between theory and practice, between action and governance, being enabled or blocked?
How do legal and regulatory structures protect diverse flows of ideas or sustain and encourage dominant imaginations?

‘Imagination infrastructure’ helps to articulate the range of resources required to support collective imagination.

Background - what is the problem?

Conversations around infrastructure are often associated with the claim that we have an ‘imaginary’ or ‘imagination’ crisis - that is, the thought that contemporary crises are attributed to a failure of imagination.

Donella Meadows in 1996: “If we haven’t specified where we want to go, it is hard to set our compass, to muster enthusiasm, or to measure progress. But vision is not only missing almost entirely from policy discussions; it is missing from our culture. We talk easily and endlessly about our frustrations, doubts, and complaints, but we speak only rarely, and sometimes with embarrassment, about our dreams and values.” [Related to Anat SO/Thomas Coombes position]

Amitav Ghosh - the gathering environmental and nature crises have been described by writers as a catastrophic failure to imagine the possibility of radical, disruptive, global ecological change

Dougald Hine and Paul Kingsnorth - or as the failure to imagine the possibility of lives beyond modern, industrialised consumption

Geoff Mulgan - there is ‘a widening gulf between what people think is possible or probable and what they think is preferable’, and that at the institutional level there is ‘a striking lack of institutions working to push the boundaries of social imagination’

Some people (like Ruth Wylie, Co-director of the Centre for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University) think that there is an abundance of imagination, but that it is being eroded by existing institutions e.g. children are overflowing with imagination.

Or, Vlad Glăveanu, Professor and Director of the Centre for Possibility Studies at Dublin City University, the crisis is not in a lack of imagination, but in the connection between imagination and action: “You hear this idea of the death of imagination. I’m not entirely sure we have that, because if you look at the cultural resources we have they are exploding. Go online, and your imagination will be fired up positively or negatively. I think the problem is the connection between those imaginations and concrete action.”

Anasuya Sengupta, Co-director of Whose Knowledge?, argued there is abundant imagination, but that it is being suppressed by dominant voices: “I don’t think there’s a crisis of imagination. I think there’s a crisis of whose imagination?”

Vanessa Andreotti - ”…‘imagination’, in and of itself, can also be part of the problem, in particular in conditions where dominant social imaginations are oriented toward sustaining existing relations of power.” “There is a way we can talk about imagination without idealization and romanticization of the imagination, looking at its problematic condition as well as its potential without seeing it as a solution to a predefined problem that also contains the imagination.”

The crisis of imagination can be diagnosed and defined in many ways, but on the whole there is agreement that a creative, creative imagination that thinks beyond existing social arrangements, draws on marginalised or suppressed perspectives and lived experiences, and can perceive and create possibilities for social transformation is being ignored or under-resourced.

What does it mean to think ‘infrastructurally’?

Thinking infrastructurally, might mean:

What is enabling or impeding flows of ideas, resources, people?
What and whose routes are open or blocked?
What standards or practices are governing the provisioning of resources to, and movement between different places?
What explicit or implicit habits are shaping movements and encounters?
What processes determine the flow of resources, and how?
How is the infrastructure being maintained or eroded, and why?
What practices of care or neglect does the infrastructure evidence?
Who is accumulating resources or starved of resources in these processes?

What is imagination?

Sociocultural psychology has shown consistently that imagining is neither an elite nor a specialised activity, but a critically significant everyday practice that is an innate capability of all individuals

Imagination is not an escape from reality, but a core cognitive function that shapes how humans understand the past and make the future

It is shaped by the societies and cultures of which it is a part

3 ways of thinking about the social imagination:

The social imagination is negotiated and transformed daily, through micro-interactions (Vanessa Andreotti reminded us that ‘the future depends less on the images we have in our heads than in our capacity to repair and weave relationships differently’)
Social imagination can be thought of as the images produced by cultural institutions (Philosopher Chiara Bottici - creation of shared images that gather publics around them that have effects on the world). They create common sense assumptions about the possible - ‘Too often we are constrained, because of the immediacy and the urgency, to focus on the outcome we want as opposed to building the soil that the thing will grow out of in an open-ended way.’ - Michal Osterweil
Thirdly, it can be understood through the lens of imaginaries produced to coordinate particular projects and secure particular social future. The research into this has tended to focus on sociotechnical imaginaries (collective visions of the future that combine social and technological elements) and how they are created by alliances actions (like governments, companies, scientists etc) who share common interests. They then use these imaginaries to shape investments, research agendas and actions. They create expectations of the future which influence what happens now, and they make today’s choices seem inevitable or necessary, based on that vision of the future. [For example: If everyone believes AI will dominate the economy, then huge investments in AI become “obvious,” while alternative paths (like investing in other technologies) seem unthinkable.]

Practices of imagination are not neutral but are embedded in historic colonial power relations and patterns of thought. These patterns of thought require divestment and unlearning if conditions for new ways of imagining are to be created.

Dylan McGarry - ‘identifying how we might “unlearn” the enculturated ways of being that encourage and reinforce coloniality’

However, Vanessa A says we can’t just resist inherited patterns of imagination - real change in how we imagine the future requires breaking away from fixed, inherited frameworks and instead adopting a flexible, relational approach that works with complexity rather than forcing it into templates.

Ecological imagination draws attention to imagination as profoundly relational and as a process that is distributed across and emerges from the complex ecologies of human and more-than-human relations

From these perspectives, we might offer a working definition of imagination as:

a personal capability and social capacity that reframes and remakes reality
which is resourced through everyday encounters, social imaginaries and the imaginal realm
mediated by extended relations of the self with both human and non-human others at micro, ecological and planetary scales
situated within historic relations of dominance and inequality, which marginalise non-dominant imaginaries and ways of knowing
and which enables individuals, communities and societies, given the right conditions and opportunities, to think beyond and outside those historic relations.

What resources and practices nurture imagination?

The resources that support imagination as defined above are, in principle, endless. From the literature we have surveyed, such resources necessarily include, amongst other things:

all of the cultural and social resources that an individual draws upon in their daily lives
everyday imaginative practices such as daydreams and wandering attention of individuals themselves
the existing informational and cultural practices of each society
the fabric of everyday micro-interactions in society
the imaginal, the image-rich space structured by cultural organisations and traditions
alliances of interested actors that intentionally promote and resist particular visions and trajectories of possible futures
communal and democratic spaces designed to negotiate and contest different visions
inherited and taken-for-granted patterns of thought and knowledge, and the intentional structures and practices of resistance and unlearning of these patterns
diverse forms of knowledge, including embodied and place-based knowledge
forms of knowledge such as dreams and visions
community practices and institutions that intentionally create encounters between different forms of knowledge
the material and ecological communities in which and through which imagining is happening
the experience of mobility and movement
the human, material, animal, plant and other ‘kin’ to whom we are related
the planetary

What resources support a critical, creative imagination?

An imagination critical of existing social relations, creatively agile in opening up and exploring new possibilities, empathetic towards and capable of learning from multiple perspectives

Favourable conditions:

where familiar and taken-for-granted ways of seeing the world can be made strange, a practice supported by close attention to the world as well as through attention to obscured or marginalised views
in which people can think and act like artists and makers of reality, having opportunities to create, to realise ideas and transform environments
these being environments in which experimentation with reality is encouraged
where people are valued and recognised; as Sangita Shresthova reminded us, ‘if people don’t feel seen as human beings, it’s hard for them to open up about imagination’
in which desire can be cultivated and critiqued
where dominant future imaginaries can be challenged and the already existing diverse possibilities of the present uncovered
in which multiple and diverse visions of the future are presented; as Andy Stirling argued, ‘the existence of a healthy, vital, multiplicity of imaginaries feeds infrastructures to become more diverse themselves’
where new stories can be invented, in particular new stories that offer opportunities for enriching and making more complex assumptions about pasts and futures
in which relationships situated in place and time can be developed over time
where the processes not just the outcomes of imagining are valued

The importance of creating spaces for people to encounter others with different perspectives and experiences

‘The more people have access to more different ways of doing things, the better. Imagination flourishes through conflict, contrast and comparison.’ - Julian Sefton Green

Pat Thompson talks of not just the importance of space of encounter, but of the time to slow down and go deeper - “As I understand it, periodically people would come from far-flung bits of country, and would spend the equivalent of two moons, so two months, talking. This was the way of sharing knowledge, of putting different knowledge together, of making knowledge. When I say talk, it was also in song and dance. This was about the transmission of knowledge to the next generation. It is what we whitefellas now understand as slow sustaining and sustainable scholarship.” - Pat Thompson talking about what can be learnt from First Nations communities

From movement and popular education:

The need for people to meet regularly over time and create shared cultural experienced and collective critique e.g. Black Panther educational projects, Clarion Cycling Club, Socialist Sunday School, The Black Education Movement, Southall Black Sisters, African Rainbow Family, Sisters Uncut, Hood Futures Studio
the importance of opportunities for groups to analyse, together, the conditions of their lives and through this, to develop what sociologist C.Wright Mills called a ‘sociological imagination’ that turns individual problems into social issues
the critical role of practices, ceremonies and rituals that maintain distinctive and pluralistic practices of imagining that are culturally transmitted over time - such practices exist in all communities, and their diversity is critical to sustaining distinctive forms of lifeworld
the importance of encounters between groups and networks, beyond immediate localities, creating relationships of solidarity over time and space - a creative critical imagination is fostered this work suggests, through networked localism, rather than parochial globalism
the importance of sustaining archives and records to allow access to a shared history as resources for new futures that can themselves be subject to reimagining; this is particularly critical in communities whose archives have been ignored, neglected, or stolen by mainstream institutions
the role of governments and legal structures in preventing knowledge monopolies, rethinking ideas of intellectual property and keeping open spaces for diverse forms of cultural production
the importance of bridges between activist and bureaucratic networks, and between insiders and outsiders, to create dialogue between emergent ideas and formalised power structures in which (in the words of educator and activist Daren Okafo) people ‘move between government and us’; and as Professor of Imagination Penny Hay argued, ‘It’s about making those processes and practices visible in order to inform policy and change’
the lively interrelationship of resistance and imagining; as Anasuya Sengupta argued, everyday resistance entails ‘holding the line and simultaneously imagining … The notion that some people do the imagining and other people do the challenging and doing is how activism has got divided. We have to acknowledge that many of us are simultaneously dreaming and doing. Dreaming has been one form of the resilience infrastructures of minoritised communities.’

Creative imagination is not only fostered in schools and cultural orgs, but also arises from infrastructures that afford particular ways of gathering, encountering, learning and creating together and across difference

Draw urgent attention to social segregation in public spaces. Demand attention to urban design and how cities shape encounters between groups. It draws attention to poverty and in particular time poverty and the loss of opportunities for encounter, socialising, stillness, unlearning and reflection.

Seek out examples of community encounters that offer rejuvenated practices of association: Tiana Johnson from Hood Futures Studios - “Everywhere needs ABUELOS and things like it — libraries, public spaces and common land, land that isn’t private. All places need a range of spaces for refuge and encounter — somewhere you can have a conversation.”

Disconnection between spaces of ‘thinking’ and spaces of ‘acting’

As Ruth Wylie pointed out, creating conditions for a creative, critical imagination will not be the work of any one sector of society, but all sectors: ‘These modes of social imagination need to be embedded throughout daily practice in schools, in businesses, in non-profits, in community organizations”

Is ‘imagination infrastructure’ a useful term? What does it do for us?

It’s a term deeply associated with modernity and is therefore a questionable term for nurturing ways of thinking and being that are intended to disrupt or question modernity.

Recognised as one among other metaphors? Treat lightly, use with care and specificity?

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