Imagination in a Time of Austerity
June 2024: PLACEMAKING FOR CIVIC IMAGINATION, PART IV. Let’s not get back to basics, please.
A snippet of the Camden Imagines report from Camden Council in London. Courtesy https://www.moralimaginations.com/camden-imagines
“One of the great casualties of austerity is likely to be imagination, the sense that alternatives to this broken regime not only exist, but can be built by us.”
This was written by Aditya Chakrabortty and published in The Guardian following the 2008 financial crash. It was referenced by Rob Hopkins in my favourite book of the past few years, From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want.
A through line of that great book is that imagination needs diversity to feed it. The dismissal of political alternatives, the loss of biodiversity, the proliferation of chain stores, giant supermarkets replacing small farmers markets - in Hopkins’ view these all play a role in diminishing our imaginations. Replacing a diverse richness of alternatives with one or two dominant options.
Take a second, and think of a banana.
I’ll betcha it looked like one of these:
Did you know there are more than 1,000 varieties of banana and every single banana many of us will ever eat is a Cavendish clone, not grown from seed but from cuttings of the suckers growing underground. That means it has no way of mutating and evolving, which is great for product consistency but terrible for food resilience (e.g. if there’s a Cavendish disease) and terrible for our imaginations.
(Sidebar: It’s also the reason - thank you Greg Quinn from Home Orchard Care for the story - that banana-flavoured lollies taste nothing like bananas. Artificial banana flavour was ‘perfected’ in mid-1800s America, where hardly anyone had tasted a real banana. One of the first bananas to reach the U.S. was a Gros Michel variety from Martinique. It dominated the American market for around 100 years until fungal plagues mostly wiped it out in the 1950s. That led to the era of the fungus-resistant Cavendish that we’re still in today. And apparently banana-flavoured lollies taste rather like the now-extremely-rare Gros Michel. Though I doubt I’ll ever know.)
Look at these beauties. Please draw a purplish banana next time you get the chance so when people comment on it you can launch into a story about civic imagination.
Let’s return to that opening quotation: “One of the great casualties of austerity is likely to be imagination, the sense that alternatives to this broken regime not only exist, but can be built by us.” Set austerity aside for a moment. Since I was a kid, with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, a lot of people have pronounced that liberal Western capitalist democracy is now the only legitimate and universally desired political system. There are a lot of authoritarian regimes left out there, but (the narrative goes) we all know they’re bad and illegitimate and it’s just a long slow process of everyone coming to the light that is democracy.
There are also, of course, 1000s of varieties (or potential varieties) of democracy. But when we use that term, we almost always mean a fairly narrow band of parliamentary or presidential democracy prominent in Europe, the Americas and Australasia. We’re the Cavendish of political systems, and we’ve largely forgotten or no longer believe in all the other types of bananas out there.
That’s a big part of the story why Civic Imagination is so important right now. Alternative systems are already an endangered species.
Now let’s return to austerity. At core, I think it’s just about reducing government spending. Naturally, that brings in huge value judgments about what is core or important and what is superfluous or ‘nice to have’. Having recently read through the 10-year Long Term Plans (LTPs) of all 78 local government authorities in New Zealand, I saw repeated use of phrases like ‘back to basics’, and it’s very clear that what’s basic, or core, is roading, pipes and other hard infrastructure. Arts, events, social programmes and social infrastructure – and in many places things like cycle lanes and even climate adaptation programmes – fall into the ‘nice to have’ category and are presently being cut or deferred.
Auckland Council's #1 priority is Getting Back to Basics. From their 2024-34 LTP Consultation document.
It's back to basics for Upper Hutt City Council as well...
So our very narrow Cavendish political system gets even further chopped down to managing the provision of a handful of core services, and civic imagination takes yet another hit.
But there ARE examples of governments that value civic imagination. The municipal government in Bologna, Italy established an Office of Civic Imagination, managed by Fondazione Innovatione Urbana – an independent not-for-profit a bit like Gap Filler . They write:
“Our multi-professional team in the Office of Civic Imagination works as a research and development group to connect the resources, choices, and projects of the Administration with the needs, potential, and capacities of citizens and the community. [...] The goal is to imagine new solutions so that city government is increasingly the fruit of exercising shared responsibility in caring for spaces and places, in the sustainable use and equal enhancement of local resources.”
Imagine if our local governments proactively engaged local communities to identify civic issues and resourced them to come up with unique local solutions to try!
Bogotá, Colombia continues to evolve its model of citizen assemblies for the imagination. In addition to hosting a citizen assembly composed of randomly selected citizens who deliberate on policy issues, the city launched an open online platform for all citizens to contribute their ideas to the city’s governance. The city’s public innovation lab, Demo Lab (formed by the city in 2020), facilitates digital consultations on its site which allows residents to gather online, debate topics, and contribute ideas, including what should be on the City Council’s agenda.
A snippet of the Camden Imagines report from Camden Council in London. Courtesy https://www.moralimaginations.com/camden-imagines
One of my favourite examples is Camden Imagines. In late 2022, Camden Council in London became the first UK local authority to offer Imagination Activist training to its staff. In their short video about the project, one of the staff members says:
“So I think in Camden we’ve got a number of really sort of complex challenges that we face and our communities face. And if we do things in the same way as we’ve done before, we’ll get the same answers. And we know that we're not making the progress that we want in a lot of these really deep rooted challenges. So imagination is really trying something different. It’s a way of reframing some of those issues and also reframing our ambition.”
She articulates what we might call the ‘hiding in plain sight’ discovery that when we face really complex, intractable problems then narrowing our focus and getting ‘back to basics’ (i.e. the things we’ve always done) is precisely the wrong approach. Indeed, when budgets are tighter than ever, the roads are deteriorating, we’re missing every climate target, our three waters infrastructure is in a dire state – this is precisely the time when we most desperately need to invest in imagination.
All of these civic imagination ventures that I’m aware of have a focus on generating ideas and feeding into important policy and regulatory reform. Where Christchurch, as an example, has the bones and experience to develop an even richer model is in our recent history of widespread placemaking. With a partnership between local government, universities, companies and placemaking groups like Gap Filler, we could establish a Civic Imagination Lab that goes a step further than idea generation, by delivering prototypes on the ground in the city to help seed new ideas and make change feel more possible, desirable and fun.
Imagine our local government’s Smart City team helping to identify civic issues and providing data and ongoing monitoring; our placemaking organisations leading participatory design processes with a diverse range of residents and stakeholders; our business and social entrepreneurs bringing their resources and innovation into the problem solving; our academic institutions helping inform the processes and evaluate the most effective solutions; and all of this leading to unique local trials and prototypes being delivered on the streets to show what’s possible, pilot unique potential solutions, attract attention and spark that collective civic imagination.
We know that we have the capability here to make this happen. Whether our politicians and civil servants will be brave enough to prioritise imagination in a time of austerity I highly doubt. But I can’t see us addressing the challenges ahead without it.
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