In the discussion of community resilience, there is often a tendency to focus on the ability of communities to adapt to environmental, social, economic or political changes - that is, resilience as a reaction to an external force or event. What is less commonly discussed it the proactive aspect of resilience: the recognition that communities can also actively imagine and implement changes from within, rather than in response to external pressure. A resilient community, in this framing, is one which can exercise agency over its own future, steering towards the preferable and potentially avoiding those circumstances which it would otherwise have to forcibly adapt to. What then are the spaces and practices which cultivate this proactive resilience?
The systems innovator Cassie Robinson has coined the term 'imagination infrastructure' to refer to 'the infrastructural preconditions for societal imagination'. In order to transform our lives and societies, we need to be able to imagine how things could be different. But in an increasingly globalized, individualistic and precarious everyday, it can be hard to find the time and space to imagine alternatives, much less to build or experience them. (Renowned anthropologist and anarchist thinker David Graeber has written that neoliberalism can best be understood as a political project of 'trying to make capitalism seem the only viable economic system' - that is, as a suppression of alternative imaginaries.)
Yet imagination is 'a crucial component for collective agency and our broader capacity for long-term survival and thriving as a species' (Finn and Wylie, 2021) meaning that it is important to notice and support those spaces which do permit and facilitate the important work of societal imagination. In the Netherlands, the CoNECT team have been engaged in ethnographic and participatory research within four 'buurthuiskamers' - neighborhood living rooms. These are self-organized spaces existing outside of the market, the institution and the private home; spaces where the normal rules and patterns of everyday life are disrupted, or suspended, and where people are therefore encouraged, even obliged, to decide collectively what to do, and how to do it. Using the framing of 'imagination infrastructure', these spaces can be seen to contribute to a transformative project in three key ways:
1) Revealing desires
These places express and articulate the latent needs and desires of residents in their everyday lives. When citizens are given the space to 'act otherwise' in a space that is not governed by the predetermined norms of the home, the institution or the market, the things they choose to do, and the way they choose to interact with each other, represent choices about what kind of world they want to live in, and what might be missing or inadequate in those other spheres of daily life. This is not only in reaction to shortcomings or reduced public services, but also 'proactive and playful visions and imaginaries of how the world could be different.' (Thompson, 2019:1174)
2) Inducing desires
Secondly, and following on from this point, they function as generators or incubators of new initiatives, and offer room to experiment with alternative possibilities. By demonstrating new ideas or practices, and giving people 'permission' to imagine and propose alternatives, participants discover things they did not yet know they wanted: new desires are stimulated by experiencing something more desirable.
3) Prefiguring alternative futures
This immediate, embodied experience of alternatives can be read as a form of prefiguration: the political strategy of collapsing the means and the ends of political change into direct manifestation in the world. So, rather than imagining a desired endpoint and working backwards to figure out the means to get there, prefiguration asks us to act 'as if' we already lived in that world. In addition to generating possibilities and future imaginaries, the direct and participatory nature of these spaces means they also demonstrate the viability of these alternatives - to the participants themselves, to their neighbors beyond the initiative, and potentially to policymakers or authorities. As a sort of proof of concept, they show that something is possible because it already exists. This in turn can provoke more people to imagine new possibilities, through the process of seeing and partaking in alternatives, and being given the space and tacit 'permission' to imagine and do otherwise.
Based on our ongoing research within these spaces, we can argue that neighborhood living rooms (and other kinds of community spaces and practices) support and facilitate the development and the trying-out of alternative models, futures and ways of being - an essential contribution to resilient communities and to a wider socio-ecological transition. Seen as a form of social and spatial infrastructure, these 'buurthuiskamers' empower active citizenship and agency over people's living environment and over the future of our cities and lifestyles. They are (or can be) highly valuable to the city as generators of solutions to current, future and unseen challenges. And finally they foreground everyday urban life as the locus of both the right questions to be asking about the future, and possible answers to those questions.
And if we see these kinds of spaces as a form of infrastructure vital to the life of the city, we must also ask, how do we support the creation and maintenance of this infrastructure, in the same way we prioritize transport and energy infrastructure? How can cities and the spaces themselves broaden participation to include diverse voices in the imagination process and spread the rewards of participation more widely (or, who gets to participate in shaping the future)? And as researchers and urban practitioners, how can we valorize the knowledge produced though these experiments, for collective benefit?
(This post has been adapted from a paper presented at the Architecture, Media, Politics, Society conference 'Local Cultures - Global Places' in December 2023 by Louwrens Botha: Viable futures in the everyday: neighborhood living rooms as ‘imagination infrastructure’)
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