“So what exactly do you mean by the phrase ‘ imagination infrastructures’?”
— Cassie Robinson shares more in her Imagination Infrastructures Talk and in further detail here > Imagination Infrastructures
To infrastructure’ is to create “socio-technical resources that intentionally enable[s] adoption and appropriation beyond the initial scope of the design.” It involves thinking about the embeddedness of infrastructure in a socio-technical context, and the ontological implications of this: “[T]he act of infrastructuring changes what it is to be a road…or an ecology. Infrastructures… stand between people and technology and nature and in doing so reconfigure each simultaneously” in a process of “perpetual refiguring”. Infrastructure as playground, not scaffold.
— Olivia Oldham, Imagination Infrastructure.
A long-term investment in growing and maintaining the capacity of communities and institutions to collectively imagine, so that they are able to see, feel and think differently in order to act differently.
We believe that an investment in this work is vital for communities to be able to shape their futures. Nourishing collective imagination opens up pathways of possibility that were previously unimagined or numbed and it equips communities to respond in new ways.
And, like a railway network or an electricity grid, the infrastructure of the imagination requires long-term investment and maintenance for it to continue functioning well and serving its community(ies). This kind of patient, slow investment in spaces, places, relationships and the digital and social infrastructures of the imagination will build up and maintain the collective muscle of imagination, with cumulative effects that then make other things possible.
There to enable the development, the practices and use of collective imagination.
The tools and programmes and projects which create a mycelial web of support for the practices of collective imagination are infrastructure - just as much as paths, road signs, or maps.
imagination is not an individual pursuit, but a collective one, that requires investing in sites of practice and laying the ground for ongoing practice. We have spaces for deliberative democracy across the country–town halls, local councils, the houses of Parliament, and so on; what would it look like if we built a national infrastructure of Imaginariums, too - including using spaces out in the wild, in the natural world.?
Infrastructure that exists in multiple forms - both physical and metaphysical, tangible and intangible.
We see Imagination Infrastructures existing in relational infrastructures, material infrastructures e.g archives, social infrastructures, civic infrastructures, and natural world infrastructures. Moving beyond the fixed temporality of ‘infrastructure’ - often imagined as a permanent fixture, “inert and intransigent” (Oldham, 2021) - reconceptualising infrastructure as a verb, ‘to infrastructure’, enables us to perceive this work as a process. Giroux (2021) argues that collective imagination emerges from public spaces that allow citizens to engage with each other in new ways, that enable them to be affected by each other and to imagine each other, and the more-than-human world differently.
Recognises that collective imagination is a practice that you develop overtime, and therefore our capacity to do so can be strengthened.
Just like with narrative work, advocacy or campaigning, or policy, collective imagination is a craft and a practice in its own right. It is “not a dream or ideology.” It isn’t deliberative democracy, nor is it another word for citizen assemblies. It is “a practice that starts by reframing the world around us in radically new ways,” as with Sascha Haselmayer’s explanation of social imagination. It is both practical and a practice, an experimental and ongoing process.
It is related to, but distinct from, complimentary ideas and approaches such as futures & foresight work (which focus more on scanning the horizon of what is already coming, rather than creating the conditions to imagine and construct new, alternative futures), narrative work (which shapes our understanding of the world, see Echohawk, 2021, but does not necessarily open the door to radically reimagining it), and deliberative democracy (which enables people to come together to collectively decide upon the future, but does not in and of itself require that future to be different from the present).
Resourcing the conditions for new, plural, and different imaginations to emerge.
Vital to this work is resourcing collective imaginations to grow from different soil. It must not feel familiar. Imagination Infrastructures invest in and makes legible imaginations informed by knowledge beyond the rational or intellectual, encompassing the embodied, even the spiritual, too, imagination infrastructurers can better seek pluriversal and liberatory ends. To Escobar’s point - we must create a world in which other possibilities are possible (2020).
A divestment in the status quo, to unsettle the present and open up pathways of possibility.
imagination infrastructure(ing) needs developing and building on to prevent it from collapsing into familiar, existing approaches. Like a muscle, it can be strengthened and made richer over time “[b]y creating complex and varied lenses through which to see the world.”
The future is emergent, arising from the unpredictable interactions of the multiple, complex and entangled strands of the present. To be able to imagine it, and to live into that imaginary, we need imagination infrastructures that are in a continual process of becoming. Imagination infrastructure is designing and building not scaffolds to hold up a known future, but playgrounds upon which new (and old) imaginaries can play, learn, interact and conjure. It involves paying attention to the whole and the not-yet-known as well as deprogramming.
Other key pieces to read are -
Imagination Infrastructure - Olivia Oldham, 2020
Change happens when our collective imagination changes, - Cassie Robinson, 2021